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Hello, and thanks for downloading the more or less podcast.

We're the programme that looks at the numbers in the news and in life and in AI hallucinations.

I'm Tom Coles.

As a small print warns you, if you ever ask ChatGPT to help your kid with their maths own work, AI can make mistakes. Despite having all the confidence of your overconfident friend,

some of the stuff that AI engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, GroC or Claude confidently tells you is essentially made up.

I mean, to be totally fair, everything a large language model like this tells you is just

what it thinks is the most likely answer.

But much of the time, the most likely thing is factually accurate.

Sometimes it's totally fictitious. And this totally

fictitious or false stuff is sometimes called a hallucination. Whether these hallucinations

matter depend on what you're using AI for and whether they are spotted and sorted out.

So the team on more or less were slightly surprised to see the following headline in Fortune magazine.

One of the world's top academic AI conferences accepted research papers with 100 plus AI hallucinated citations.

You might think that the top AI researchers in the world would be careful about using AI to write their research papers.

So is this number right?

And what does it mean if it is?

People have started to kind of share that they're getting citations from these big hallucinations. And it's a mixture of, I

think, Pride and Bill Wildermit. This is Alex Tway, the CTO and co-founder of GPT Zero, the company that

found these 100-plus AI hallucinations in research papers. They're like, hey, like this Alam knows so

much about my research. I think so wrote all these papers, I didn't.

In some ways, it's a weird point of pride, I think, to be hallucinated by an AI. That's definitely one sign that you've made it in the industry.

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