Understanding AI Hallucinations: The Probabilistic Nature of Chatbot Falsehoods

AI hallucinations, where chatbots confidently generate false information, are a growing concern across industries. This phenomenon is not a glitch but a feature of how Large Language Models (LLMs) operate, predicting the next word based on data patterns. OpenAI research indicates that the probabilistic nature of LLMs, predicting words sequentially, makes them prone to inaccuracies. The error rate increases with sentence length, as small mistakes can accumulate, highlighting the challenge of distinguishing genuine information from falsehoods.