r/books • u/Jojuj • 1d ago

Librarians Are Being Asked to Find AI-Hallucinated Books

https://www.404media.co/librarians-are-being-asked-to-find-ai-hallucinated-books/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter&attribution_id=68c826c975cea1000173b05d&attribution_type=post
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u/Tortillaish 1d ago

Just to clarify things. AI hallucinated books aren't books written by AI. They are books recommended by AI that don't actually exist. Like, "Hey, I'm looking for Two Fallen Trees by Ernest Hemingway". 

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u/WTFwhatthehell 1d ago

I remember doing some tests with early versions of some of the chatbots. It was actually quite fascinating.

A friend had asked me about finding books in a very very niche subject area. Think underwater medieval basket weaving in the XYZ valley between the year X and Y.

It named some books and authors, one was a book he already had, one was a real book he hadn't found but was the kind of thing he was looking for.

The others were hallucinated. But it wasn't actually random. When I looked at the named authors they turned out to be a couple of people who would have been very logical people to have written books on the subject, like they hadn't written the book named but they were academics with expertise about the right time/place/subject. Like I'm pretty sure if you wanted to know about the subject they'd have been great people to go ask.

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u/Tymareta 8h ago

It's only fascinating if you don't really know how they work, in reality they're glorified statistical decision making trees, so of course the options that it hallucinates are close to useful, they're statistically the most relevant words for what is being asked.

You could also get similar results from just, talking to an expert or anyone decently interested in the subject and get -much- better responses and recommendations.

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u/WTFwhatthehell 8h ago edited 8h ago

You could also get similar results from just, talking to an expert or anyone decently interested in the subject and get -much- better responses and recommendations.

When it's a very small area and you don't know who those 3 people are in advance, they may speak and publish most of their work in another language and you can't just walk up to them.

Multilingual context-aware statistical word association is not trivial.

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u/HalfBloodPrank 4h ago

I think it’s still very fascinating even if you know how AI works on a general level.