Claude Didn’t Hallucinate My Wife — It Stereotyped Her
AI’s friendly face disguises the prejudice behind it.
Photographer: Valentin Flauraud/AFP via Getty Images
Claude, the artificial intelligence platform, just asked me to pass along its best wishes to my wife Suchitra. This was disconcerting on multiple levels. First, because I'm not sure how I feel about my computer having emotions about my family members. (What should I have done if Claude had expressed hostility?) Second, because my wife's name is Eva Maria, which is something Claude has been told many times (her name is literally in the fourth line of Claude's internal memory about me). I've never used the name Suchitra with Claude in any context. I don't even know anyone with that name.
Apart from making me a bit less worried about the risk of an AI overlord, the striking thing here was that Claude's mistake wasn't random. It assumed that since I'm of Indian descent, my wife must be too — and went with that even when it had been told the right answer. In fact, when I asked it how it had come up with the name Suchitra, that was its explanation: