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AI Risk

Hallucination

"Hallucination is a widely recognized limitation of generative AI and it can include textual, auditory, visual or other types of hallucination (Alkaissi & McFarlane, 2023). Hallucination refers to the phenomenon in which the contents generated are nonsensical or unfaithful to the given source input (Ji et al., 2023). Azamfirei et al. (2023) indicated that "fabricating information" or fabrication is a better term t...

AI Risk3. Misinformation3.1 > False or misleading information2 - Post-deployment

Record summary

A quick snapshot of what this page covers.

Techniques0Attack methods connected to this risk.
Mitigations0Defenses that may help with related attacks.
Domain3. MisinformationThe broad risk area this belongs to.

Risk profile

How this risk is described and categorized.

"Hallucination is a widely recognized limitation of generative AI and it can include textual, auditory, visual or other types of hallucination (Alkaissi & McFarlane, 2023). Hallucination refers to the phenomenon in which the contents generated are nonsensical or unfaithful to the given source input (Ji et al., 2023). Azamfirei et al. (2023) indicated that "fabricating information" or fabrication is a better term to describe the hallucination phenomenon. Generative AI can generate seemingly correct responses yet make no sense. Misinformation is an outcome of hallucination. Generative AI models may respond with fictitious information, fake photos or information with factual errors (Dwivedi et al., 2023). Susarla et al. (2023) regarded hallucination as a serious challenge in the use of generative AI for scholarly activities. When asked to provide literature relevant to a specific topic, ChatGPT could generate inaccurate or even nonexistent literature. Current state-of-the-art AI models can only mimic human-like responses without understanding the underlying meaning (Shubhendu & Vijay, 2013). Hallucination is, in general, dangerous in certain contexts, such as in seeking advice for medical treatments without any consultation or thorough evaluation by experts, i.e., medical doctors (Sallam, 2023)."

Domain3. Misinformation
Subdomain3.1 > False or misleading information
Entity2 - AI
Intent2 - Unintentional
Timing2 - Post-deployment
CategoryTechnology concerns
SubcategoryHallucination

Suggested mitigations

Defenses that may help with related attacks.

No propagated mitigations. No defense is available through the connected attack methods.

Source

Research source for this risk, when available.