It’s Not the AI. It’s the Lawyer: We Don’t Have a Hallucination Problem, We Have a Serious Ethics Problem
Government information librarian Charlie Amiot makes a strong case for the misinterpretation of the cause of hallucinations in the legal work product. Amiot argues that If you happen to be someone who has a set of encyclopedias sitting next to them, you’re undoubtedly sitting next to hundreds of hallucinations, inserted both at the time of print and facts that have mutated with the passage of time since being printed. Any newspaper or magazine you pick up contains a hallucination. Many textbooks and reference materials contain hallucinations as well. Arguably, only in fiction can there be no hallucinations. We are otherwise surrounded by and exposed to them on a daily and hourly basis. Continuously pointing to LLM hallucinations allows the word hallucination to do a whole lot of work at getting people off the hook of personal responsibility.