When German journalist Martin Bernklautyped his name and location into Microsoft’s Copilot to see how his articles would be picked up by the chatbot, the answers horrified him. Copilot’s results asserted that Bernklau was an escapee from a psychiatric institution, a convicted child abuser, and a conman preying on widowers. For years, Bernklau had served as a courts reporter and the AI chatbot had falsely blamed him for the crimes whose trials he had covered.
The accusations against Bernklau weren’t true, of course, and are examples of generative AI’s “hallucinations.” These are inaccurate or nonsensical responses to a prompt provided by the user, and they’re alarmingly common. Anyone attempting to use AI should always proceed with great caution, because information from such systems needs validation and verification by humans before it can be trusted.
But why did Copilot hallucinate these terrible and false accusations?
We’re already there, no AI needed. Rates are all generated by computer. Ask your agent why your rate went up and they’ll say “idk computer said so”.
Someone, somewhere along the line, almost certainly coded
rate(2025) = 2*rate(2024). And someone approved that going into production.