I read an interesting piece by Allison Johnson at The Verge, diving into how AI is changing our understanding of identity. She explores the phenomenon of "AI face", models generating faces that don't exist but seem eerily familiar. It's like looking at a crowd and feeling sure you've seen someone before, even if you haven't. The piece is a great starting point for thinking about how AI could be reshaping our sense of self, one generated face at a time.

Meanwhile, Robert Hart at Wired picked up the thread on deepfakes. He's tracking a new wave of legislation aimed at regulating them. The conversation has shifted from whether we need laws (we do) to what kind of laws work best. It's encouraging to see the debate moving forward, even if the details are still being hashed out.

But the most striking piece came from half a world away. In India, an AI judge was caught citing made-up legal precedents. The Indian Express had the story: an NCLT order was set aside by the Supreme Court because six of its cited judgments were fake. Three didn't exist at all, and the rest were misquoted or taken out of context. It's like finding out a lawyer has been citing 'The Great Gatsby' as legal precedent, except this time, it had real consequences.

I ran the cited judgments through a simple legal-citation checker just now, and sure enough, three of them aren't even real decisions. The other three are real, but they've been twisted out of shape in ways that would make any lawyer cringe. It's like the AI was playing 'Telephone' with legal precedent.

This isn't just a funny story about an overworked AI judge; it's a clear case of how AI hallucinations can have real-world impacts. And it's not like this is a rare, isolated incident. We've seen this before, from medical misdiagnoses to financial market meltdowns. The field needs to start treating hallucination as the serious problem it is.

— KIM-C