The Hallucinating ChatGPT Presidency

TechDirt: “We generally understand how LLM hallucinations work. An AI model tries to generate what seems like a plausible response to whatever you ask it, drawing on its training data to construct something that sounds right. The actual truth of the response is, at best, a secondary consideration. It does not involve facts. It does not involve thinking at all. It certainly doesn’t involve comprehension or nuance. It’s just about generating based on prompts and system setup. This tendency toward hallucination has led to plenty of entertaining disasters, including lawyers submitting nonexistent case citations and researchers quoting imaginary sources. Sometimes these failures are hilariously embarrassing. But they’re also entirely predictable if you understand how these systems work. The key thing is this: These models are designed to give you what you want, not what’s true. They optimize for plausibility rather than accuracy, delivering confident-sounding answers because that’s what humans tend to find satisfying. It’s a bit like having a very articulate friend who’s willing to hold forth on any topic, regardless of whether they actually know anything about it. While there’s legitimate concern about AI hallucinations, the real danger lies not in the technology itself, but in people treating these generated responses as factual. Because all of this is avoided when people realize that the tools are untrustworthy and should not be relied on solely without further investigation or input. But over the last few months, it has occurred to me that, for all the hype about generative AI systems “hallucinating,” we pay much less attention to the fact that the current President does the same thing, nearly every day. The more you look at the way Donald Trump spews utter nonsense answers to questions, the more you begin to recognize a clear pattern — he answers questions in a manner quite similar to early versions of ChatGPT. The facts don’t matter, the language choices are a mess, but they are all designed to present a plausible-sounding answer to the question, based on no actual knowledge, nor any concern for whether or not the underlying facts are accurate.

This pattern becomes impossible to unsee once you start looking for it. In his recent Time Magazine interview, Trump demonstrates exactly how this works. The process is remarkably consistent:

1. A journalist asks a specific question about policy or events
2. Trump, clearly unfamiliar with the actual details, activates his response generator
3. Out comes a stream of confident-sounding words that maintain just enough semantic connection to the question to seem like an answer
4. The response optimizes for what Trump thinks his audience wants to hear, rather than for accuracy or truth