🏢 All hands on desk

In 1943, scientist Albert Hofmann accidentally ingested a substance he’d been developing as a respiratory and circulatory stimulant.

Shortly thereafter, he experienced “an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors.” Unbeknownst to Hofmann, he’d made the hallucinogen LSD.

But what happens when AI hallucinates? Well, it’s kind of like talking to a drunk guy at a bar: they’re wrong, but very confident about it.

It’s not just a ‘lie’

AI could potentially “read” something incorrect on the internet and repeat it, but a hallucination isn’t regurgitated bullshit. It’s inaccurate information that doesn’t correspond with its training data (i.e., the texts, images, etc. it was fed).

For example, Google’s Bard chatbot told Wall Street Journal columnist Ben Zimmer that Hans Jakobsen — a linguist who never existed — coined the term “argumentative diphthongization,” a phrase Zimmer made up.

More troubling: An Australian politician is considering suing OpenAI after ChatGPT claimed he’d served time in prison for bribery, while a professor said it fabricated a Washington Post article accusing him of sexual harassment.

Why does this happen?

We wish we knew! Google CEO Sundar Pichai told “60 Minutes” that all models — including Bard — have this problem, but no one’s been able to solve or fully understand it.

The thing about ChatGPT, Bard, Bing, and other language models is that they don’t really know anything. They just use all the data at their disposal to predict and generate text — and sometimes that text is wrong.

Is ‘hallucination’ even the right term for this?

A lot of people are using it, but some argue it falsely humanizes machines. Linguistics professor Emily Bender has suggested alternative terms for the phenomenon, such as “synthesized ungrounded text” or perhaps the simpler and snappier “made shit up.”

How popular are Hawaiian vacations? It wasn’t long ago that Maui’s cheapest rental car was a $722-per-day Toyota Camry.

On one hand, the surge in travel following the state’s pandemic-driven ~24% unemployment rate has been a welcome development.

On another, it’s a sobering reminder of Hawaii’s complex overtourism issues.

Say HI to high costs

Hawaii has been so good at marketing itself that it’s come back to bite ’em in the form of… too many tourists.

In 2019, Hawaii’s 1.5m residents hosted a record 10.4m visitors, bagging $2B+ in tourism tax revenue — along with the steeper piles of garbage, traffic, and local housing costs that come with it.

A 2022 survey found 67% of residents agreed Hawaii was “run for tourists at the expense of local people” and 66% preferred their tax dollars be spent managing tourists’ impacts rather than encouraging further tourism.

Lei-ing down the law

In early 2020, Hawaii reformed its tourism office with a plan the authority’s president said would “balance between tourism’s economic benefits and its impacts on local communities.”

Interestingly, as tourism rebounds near pre-pandemic highs, the state does appear to be making more with less: In March, Hawaii saw 97% of 2019’s visitor numbers, but a 23.4% increase in tourist spending.

Progress hasn’t been quick enough for some legislators — Hawaii’s tourism office now faces funding cuts and even flat-out replacement by an agency with no marketing focus, per Bloomberg.

While that gets sorted out, tourists will keep making their presence known, driving straight into harbors and whatnot.

Let’s recap the last few weeks:

• IBM’s Arvind Krishna: “Your career does suffer” when you work remotely.
• OpenAI’s Sam Altman: Going fully remote was “one of the tech industry’s worst mistakes” and “the experiment on that is over.”
• Lyft’s David Risher, reneging on the company’s flexible-work policy: “Things just move faster when you’re face to face.”
• Billionaire Sam Zell: Remote work is “a bunch of bullshit.”

They aren’t alone…

Execs who’ve publicly railed on remote work form a corporate America all-star team: Bob Iger, Marc Benioff, Jamie Dimon, Elon Musk, and Howard Schultz.

You’ll repeatedly see numbers like these used to back their cause:

• US workers’ Q1 productivity dipped, down 2.7% YoY from 2022.
• Low employee engagement cost the global economy $7.8T in 2021.

But is that the whole story?

Of course not. It’s also not hard to find data and studies that back the case for remote work.

Plus, the economy isn’t a monolith — the merits and demerits of in-office, hybrid, and remote work arrangements vary by company and industry.

Economist Gregory Daco told Fortune it all comes back to trust: “The office isn’t essential. Work can be done remotely. The question is… is there trust that employees are actually working?”

As the remote-work battle heats up, here’s to hoping everyone can rally around this universal truth: There’s but one truly perfect form of employment — getting paid to track damages from every crash in The Fast and Furious franchise. (It’s remote.)