Generative artificial intelligence models are rooted in ideas of mid-20th-century engineers who thought some amount of irrationality was essential for a machine that could think like a human, contends Benjamin Lindquist, an assistant professor in the MIT History Section, who holds an MIT Schwarzman College of Computing shared position with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and is a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems.
To mimic creative thinking, these AI pioneers intentionally injected randomness into algorithms designed to deterministically solve problems, Lindquist writes in a new paper that appears in the journal Past and Present.
In the paper, he traces the origins of AI hallucinations back to this early research and suggests there will be inevitable trade-offs between creativity and predictability when trying to build machines that mimic human behavior. MIT News spoke with Lindquist about these ideas.
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