Another week, another story about a lawyer or researcher citing cases or studies that don’t exist. The initial instinct is to blame the Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent (e.g., Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.) for returning a hallucination in response to a prompt. But the real fault lies with the user.
For over 25 years, most of us have relied upon the internet and search engines for research. Enter a query into your favorite search engine and receive a list of websites about your topic. Click a link on the source that appeared closest to our interests.
Of course, there’s an almost unlimited supply of websites with bogus content. It’s the responsibility of the researcher to determine if the website was a legitimate source of information. The addition of Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) helped weed out many – but not all – scammers.
When using an AI agent, too many users just accept the response. A quick “copy/paste” into a document and their work is done. And therein lies the problem.
A good practice to use is adding the words “include links to the sources”. For example, there may be a need to buy a new inserter. You can enter the prompt, “We insert 30,000 pages a day into 20,000 envelopes. Compare the top 5 inserter models that offer integrity-based inserting. Include URLs for any reviews and the URLs of the companies and products included.”
With the response, you can click through to the websites the AI agent used to create the comparisons. Plus, you can go directly to the product pages on the internet to be sure the equipment meets your requirements.
The courts are holding lawyers accountable for submitting citations without verifying the accuracy of the sources. Your managers and your customers will hold you accountable as well.
Verification – the last, critical step when using AI for research and analysis.
Amazing Astronomical Fact: Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a spiral galaxy. We don’t have any images from outside the Milky Way. So how do we know?
Scientists use a series of observations to deduce the shape and size of our galaxy. The first is a concentration of stars along the galactic plane, similar to other galaxies we have observed. Then, by examining the distance between stars, they could be mapped, and the shape of the galaxy began to take shape. Space-based telescopes provided better measurements of the location and movement of stars, confirming that we are part of a spiral galaxy.
The Pinwheel Galaxy (Messier 101) can be observed face-on with its arms on full display. This galaxy is approximately 21 to 25 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major (aka The Big Dipper).
#artificialintelligence #ai #halluncination #verification #MilkyWay #pinwheelgalaxy #theberkshirecompany
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