https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/05/technology/ai-hallucinations-chatgpt-google.html

 

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Credit...Erik Carter
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A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting
Worse

A new wave of "reasoning" systems from companies like OpenAI is
producing incorrect information more often. Even the companies don't
know why.

Credit...Erik Carter

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Cade MetzKaren Weise

By Cade Metz and Karen Weise

Cade Metz reported from San Francisco, and Karen Weise from Seattle.

  * May 5, 2025

Last month, an A.I. bot that handles tech support for Cursor, an
up-and-coming tool for computer programmers, alerted several
customers about a change in company policy. It said they were no
longer allowed to use Cursor on more than just one computer.

In angry posts to internet message boards, the customers complained.
Some canceled their Cursor accounts. And some got even angrier when
they realized what had happened: The A.I. bot had announced a policy
change that did not exist.

"We have no such policy. You're of course free to use Cursor on
multiple machines," the company's chief executive and co-founder,
Michael Truell, wrote in a Reddit post. "Unfortunately, this is an
incorrect response from a front-line A.I. support bot."

More than two years after the arrival of ChatGPT, tech companies,
office workers and everyday consumers are using A.I. bots for an
increasingly wide array of tasks. But there is still no way of
ensuring that these systems produce accurate information.

The newest and most powerful technologies -- so-called reasoning
systems from companies like OpenAI, Google and the Chinese start-up
DeepSeek -- are generating more errors, not fewer. As their math
skills have notably improved, their handle on facts has gotten
shakier. It is not entirely clear why.

Today's A.I. bots are based on complex mathematical systems that
learn their skills by analyzing enormous amounts of digital data.
They do not -- and cannot -- decide what is true and what is false.
Sometimes, they just make stuff up, a phenomenon some A.I.
researchers call hallucinations. On one test, the hallucination rates
of newer A.I. systems were as high as 79 percent.

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