Making things up is AI's Achilles heel

Generative AI makes things up. It can't distinguish between fact and fiction. It asserts its fabrications with confident authority. All that was true in 2022 when ChatGPT debuted, and it's still true. But the tech industry keeps remodeling the entire digital universe around AI as if none of it were happening. GenAI's unreliability may just be a nuisance when you're asking it for a recipe or a video recommendation. It's far more troubling when the technology moves into medicine, finance, law and other realms where "oops, sorry" doesn't cut it. GenAI's "hallucinations," "confabulations" and errors aren't random bugs—they're a fundamental part of how this technology works. Model builders can adjust the level of randomness, but they can never guarantee that the model will always address the same question with the same answer. Users expect AI to behave like any traditional computing tool—with consistency and logic—whereas genAI always has an element of unpredictability and randomness.