MIT historian argues AI hallucinations stem from mid-20th-century randomization in early neural nets
Benjamin Lindquist (MIT) argues in a paper in Past and Present that early AI researchers intentionally injected randomness into algorithms and neural networks to mimic human creativity; he traces today’s generative-AI hallucinations to those mid-20th-century design choices and warns of inherent tradeoffs between creativity and predictability in systems that model human thought. In an interview with MIT News he contrasts early enthusiasm for occasional strangeness with modern efforts (e.g., by OpenAI and Anthropic) to suppress such behavior for safety and commercial reasons.