The not understanding hlw it works thing isn't universal in ai from my understanding. And people understand how a lot of it works even then. There may be a few mysterious but its not sacrificing chickens to Jupiter either.

What exactly are your bona fides that you get to play the part of the exasperated "expert" here? And, more importantly, why should I give a fuck?

I constantly hear this shit from other self-appointed experts in this field as if no one is allowed to discuss, criticize, or form opinions on the implications of this technology besides those few who 'truly understand'.

Seems like there are a lot of half baked ideas online about AI that seem to come from assumptions based on some sci-fi ideal or something. People are shocked that an artificial intelligence gets things wrong when they themselves have probably made a handful of incorrect assumptions today. This Tom Scott talk is a great explanation of how truth can never be programmed into anything. And will never really be obtainable to humanity in the foreseeable future.

Hallucinations in AI are fairly well understood as far as I'm aware. Explained in high level on the Wikipedia page for it. And I'm honestly not making any objective assessment of the technology itself. I'm making a deduction based on the laws of nature and biological facts about real life neural networks. (I do say AI is driven by the data it's given, but that's something even a layman might know)

How to mitigate hallucinations is definitely something the experts are actively discussing and have limited success in doing so (and I certainly don't have an answer there either), but a true fix should be impossible.

I can't exactly say why I'm passionate about it. In part I want people to be informed about what AI is and is not, because knowledge about the technology allows us to make more informed decision about the place AI takes in our society. But I'm also passionate about human psychology and creativity, and what we can learn about ourselves from the quirks we see in these technologies.