Cambridge Dictionary chooses ‘hallucinate’ as word of the year for 2023
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New Delhi: The Cambridge Dictionary team has chosen hallucinate as its word of the year 2023, thanks to its new shade of meaning in the context of Artificial Intelligence.
The team ‘recognised that the new meaning gets to the heart of why people are talking about AI.’
Up until now, hallucinate has been about ‘to see, hear, feel or smell something’ that does not exist usually from a health condition or because of the effect of a drug.
Emergence of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Bard this year and they hype surrounding it has given an additional meaning to the word.
The Cambridge Dictionary this year has updated the word’s meaning to explain that ‘when an artificial intelligence hallucinates, it produces false information.’
As the artificial intelligence is at its nascent years of development, generative AI tools often dish out falsehoods bordering on nonsensical, hallucinating people.
Generative AI provides results based on information already available to it; popular AI tools like ChatGPT and Bard recreate human thought and linguistic expression using millions of existing sources.
Wendalyn Nichols, Cambridge Dictionary’s Publishing Manager, said ‘At their best, large language models can only be as reliable as their training data.’
‘AIs are fantastic at churning through huge amounts of data to extract specific information and consolidate it. But the more original you ask them to be, the likelier they are to go astray’ she was quoted as saying.
The Cambridge Dictionary team every year since 2015 has been publishing popular word of the year.
The selection is made based on popularity of the word and the cultural importance associated with it.
Announcing its decision on Wednesday, the team said: ‘The Cambridge Dictionary team chose hallucinate as its Word of the Year 2023 as it recognised that the new meaning gets to the heart of why people are talking about AI.’