Does ChatGPT need a psychiatrist? Similarities between human psychopathology and errors in large language models (opens in new tab)

Two striking phenomena of the human mind encountered in mental healthcare are hallucinations and confabulations; perceiving things that are not there, or filling memory gaps with invented stories. Interestingly, contemporary artificial intelligence systems, such as large language models (LLMs) and automatic speech recognition tools, show remarkably similar errors. They are known to “hallucinate” words, or “confabulate” facts when information is missing, producing output that feels coherent bu...