AI Hallucinations

“Your brain processes visuals 60,000x faster than text.”

Have you heard or read something similar to the quote listed above? I’m sure you have seen some variations of it.

This popped up when I was working on a presentation/carousel on the advantages visualizations have over text. There is a post that I did here to talk about how the visuals dramatically showed the story of CoPilot predicting the Oscar winner.

That quote came from CoPilot when I asked it to improve my slide presentation. CoPilot told me to deliver a “boom” moment and provided that quote as an example of a “boom” moment.

I thought that was great and was about to use it in my presentation.

But it turns out it was a hallucination – an AI hallucination.

The first inkling that something is not right.

I came this || close to using it but then I remembered, I wanted to attribute that fact to some kind of research. It had all the feels of a fact.

I turned to Google search to find who first discovered this “fact” and I got this link. Clicking on that link led me to this site.

I thought, “I don’t think that is what I want. I need the original source.”

CoPilot admits the quote is a hallucination

After some thinking and saying, “yeah, that’s not it”, I went back to CoPilot and asked:

“Who is the source for the phrase: “your brain processes visuals 60,000x faster than texts”?”

And the response from CoPilot was:

The phrase “your brain processes visuals 60,000x faster than text” appears to have originated from a 1982 Business Week advertising section written by Philip Cooper, then president of Computer Pictures Corporation. However, the claim was made without any research citation and has been widely repeated in marketing and design contexts over the years. Scientific studies do not support such an extreme difference in processing speeds between visuals and text.

It’s fascinating how some statements gain traction despite lacking solid evidence, isn’t it? Let me know if you’d like to explore this further!

CoPilot

Further digging confirms CoPilot

I dug a little further to verify what I was reading and turned up a couple of articles where the authors attempted to find the original source of that quote.

Here’s a fascinating story where the author tried and could find nothing: FACT CHECKED: “Human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text”.

But astonishingly, other news magazines have made the same error! So, it’s not just AI hallucinating. Fast Company and TechCrunch has made the same mistake.

The above image came from this story: “Research: Is a Picture Worth 1000 Words or 60,000 Words in Marketing?”

AI Hallucinations: garbage in = garbage out

There’s a lot of garbage floating in the internet, some of it unintended, others intentional. This quote is more of the unintended variety.

Other types of hallucinations can be where AI just flatly makes things up.

How do we spot AI hallucinations?

Here are some ideas I have for spotting potential hallucinations.

• Be sure to separate the facts from the opinions.
• Be aware and identify the facts in the AI response and verify them. If I hadn’t thought about needing attribution to a “fact” of visual processing, I would have included that quote in my presentation. Fortunately, I was alert.
• Try running the AI output into another AI and ask for any errors or falsehoods.
• Scrutinize any links provided and check that they support the contention.
• Scrutinize any numbers quoted and make sure AI captured the true meaning. Sometimes it misconstrues the meaning.

There are not a lot of techniques for spotting hallucinations available, but those few that I have identified seems to be sufficient. At least they saved me from the embarrassment of putting out false information out there.

That visual hallucination lives on.

A week or so after I posted my presentation, I saw another presenter (actually 2 presenters) utilize that very same quote. So, the lie lives on.