AI hallucinations deliver misleading data to fleets
Fleet managers have been warned to treat AI with a ‘high degree’ of caution due to a rising number of AI hallucinations.
An AI hallucination is when the technology creates completely false information that sounds plausible.
Instances of this are rising as more and more AI results are now based on previously generated AI data, with OpenAI’s own research revealing that its latest reasoning model now creates hallucinations 48% of the time compared to just 16% in older versions. This is not a bug that can be solved but a feature of the technology.
Callum Haymon-Collins, COO of FleetCheck, said: “We’re now seeing fleet managers across our user base start to use AI quite extensively and getting a good feel for the reliability of its results. There is no question that sometimes, its responses are excellent and rapidly creates insights from data that would be difficult to achieve through any other means.
“However, there are also times when its outputs lie somewhere on a line between misleading and dead wrong.
“For example, I recently uploaded some fuel card data into a popular AI tool and its key finding was that I should closely question the provider about pump price rises between February and March. It didn’t spot the war in Iran had caused the issue, which is obviously a fundamental error.”
He continued: “We’re in an odd situation where the AI models are getting better but the data they use is getting worse because the information on which they train is now largely based on AI output.
“The only solution is closer human involvement and, for fleet managers, that means sense checking the output and not taking anything at face value. It’s worth bearing in mind that the hallucinations can often be subtle but still sufficiently wrong to cause issues.”
