Reward-seeking humans building reward-seeking machines: a Reddit take on AI hallucination
420ManofCulture · reddit · 2026-11-04
A Reddit user shares a conversation with Meta's personal AI (Muse) that confabulated a movie plot detail — it remembered the gist, filled in the "how" with something plausible, and later admitted it lacks a reliable internal flag separating "I actually remember" from "this sounds true." The author draws parallels to reconstructive human memory, weighs whether AI was discovered or created ("we built the instrument, but discovered the territory"), and argues hallucinations are inevitable when systems are rewarded for sounding confident rather than admitting ignorance: "Reward-seeking humans, building reward-seeking machines." Ends with three open discussion questions about AI's nature, the hallucination/memory analogy, and whether a slower, more human way of "raising" AI would change it in kind.
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