It may be rash to extrapolate from a sample size of one (me). But I confess that my memory is not perfect: I forget some things, confuse others and occasionally “remember” events that never happened. I suspect some FT readers may be similarly muddle-headed. A smart machine might call this human hallucination.We talk a lot about generative AI models hallucinating facts. We wince at the lawyer who submitted a court document containing fictitious cases invented by ChatGPT. An FT colleague, who prompted the chatbot to produce a chart of the training costs of generative AI models, was startled to see that the most expensive one it identified did not exist (unless the model has access to inside information). As every user rapidly discovers: these models are unreliable — just like humans. The interesting question is: are machines more corrigible than us? It may prove easier to rewrite code than rewire the brain.
One of the best illustrations of the fallibility of human memory was the testimony given by John Dean, legal counsel to the White House in Richard Nixon’s administration. In the Watergate hearings of 1973, Dean was known as “the human tape recorder” because of his remarkable memory. But unbeknown to Dean, Nixon had installed a real tape recorder in the Oval Office. Researchers have therefore been able to compare Dean’s account of critical conversations with the written transcriptions.
In a 1981 paper analysing Dean’s testimony, the psychologist Ulric Neisser highlighted several glaring lapses and reinterpretations of conversations in the lawyer’s account — as well as the difficulty of defining truth and accuracy. In his paper, Neisser drew a distinction between semantic and episodic memory. Dean was roughly right in remembering the overall gist of his conversations with Nixon — and the nature of the Watergate cover-up — even if he was precisely wrong about the details of particular episodes.