Listened to a Marketplace Tech episode about AI backed banking chatbots. A line caught my attention.:

Sometimes people characterize made-up statements as hallucinations. I think that’s giving a little too much humanity to a robot, but if you would be comfortable with a teller just fully making something up to a member of the public, that tells you what you’d be comfortable with your technology doing.

Erie Meyer, For banking customers, AI chatbots may have trust issues

Chatbots make mistakes. Humans also make mistakes. But humans hold computers to a higher standard.

My occasional frustration with bank employees is they make mistakes. Like all employees. Because to err is human. Being a technologist, my days are spent working on computer systems making mistakes.

People distrust self-driving cars but ride with a human barely holding on to their license due to getting caught recklessly driving. How? They can look into a human’s eyes and judge them as trustworthy or not. It’s not based on historical data or facts as much as a feel.

I don’t expect technology to be perfect, but in many ways it can be better than a human. And often my days are spent trying to get humans to let go of things they are doing a good enough job where technology could do as good a job or even better.

The real hallucinations are human judgement.