Opinion ‘Hallucinate’, Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year and the perils of AI

There’s no substance abuse involved here, only a confirmation of a niggling concern. In addressing what has increasingly become one of the prime concerns of data scientists and technocrats, Cambridge’s word of the year, “hallucinate”, leads the mind to wander to some worryingly plausible directions — of AI providing misleading or fallacious information. Consider this: Earlier this year, an image of Pope Francis wearing what appeared to be a puffer jacket from a luxury fashion brand went viral. Only, it was discovered later, that it wasn’t the Pope in a Balenciaga. It was an image generated by AI. Closer home, a video purportedly showing actor Rashmika Mandanna turned out to be a deep fake.

The ever-expanding reach of Open AI, and its tools such as Chat GPT, Google Bard or Microsoft’s Copilot, has been one of the talking points of the year and its reflection can be seen across dictionaries. Collins Dictionary announced “AI” as its word of the year. Cambridge’s addendum to the traditional meaning of “hallucinate” (“to seem to see, hear, feel, or smell something that does not exist, usually because of a health condition or because you have taken a drug”) now broadens its scope to also mean “When an artificial intelligence (a computer system that has some of the qualities that the human brain has, such as the ability to produce language in a way that seems human) hallucinates, it produces false information”. This is in addition to the inclusion of other AI-related terms.

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Built using huge amounts of data, AI’s essentiality across fields is now a reality. But the “intelligentisation” of AI posits real and clear danger, manifest already in politics and public life. Disinformation — when data is deliberately manipulated to serve specific ends — and misinformation — wrong or misleading information — can have far-reaching consequences for events such as elections, wars or disasters. Cambridge’s word of the year foregrounds the complications of AI, from the realm of the imaginary to one of possibility.