Hallucinatory AI May Not Necessarily Be a Bad Thing

The smart machines, it turns out, are dreaming up riots of unrealities that help scientists track cancer, design drugs, and even win the Nobel Prize.

- WILLIAM J BROAD

Artificial intelligence often gets criticized because it makes up information that appears to be factual, known as hallucinations. The plausible fakes have roiled not only chatbot sessions but lawsuits and medical records. For a time last year, a patently false claim from a new Google chatbot helped drive down the company's market value by an estimated $100 billion. In the universe of science, however, innovators are finding that AI hallucinations can be remarkably useful. The smart machines, it turns out, are dreaming up riots of unrealities that help scientists track cancer, design drugs, invent medical devices, uncover weather phenomena and even win the Nobel Prize.

"The public thinks it's all bad," said Amy McGovern, a computer scientist who directs a federal AI institute. "But it's actually giving scientists new ideas. It's giving them the chance to explore ideas they might not have thought about otherwise." Now, AI hallucinations are reinvigorating the creative side of science. They speed the process by which scientists and inventors dream up new ideas and test them to see if reality concurs. It's the scientific method—only supercharged.

"We're exploring," said James J. Collins, an MIT professor who recently praised hallucinations for speeding his research into novel antibiotics. "We're asking the models to come up with completely new molecules."

Producing a minuscule system for drug deliveries

The AI hallucinations arise when scientists teach generative computer models about a particular subject and then let the machines rework that information. The results can range from subtle and wrongheaded to surreal. At times, they lead to major discoveries.