For years, a partner of mine would close out an explanation with five words:
“Everybody knows how that works.”
Because I am who I am, I’d ask him to define “everybody.” I’d ask whether it included me (it usually didn’t); not because he meant to exclude me, but because he’d never actually said what he meant. He’d said something that pointed toward an explanation and assumed the pointing 👉🏾 was enough.
It wasn’t.
After the relationship ended, I went looking for an explanation of my own. I wanted to understand what was happening in our miscommunication.
So, I ordered a stack of books about ambiguity.
The books approached the topic in the context of linguistics, law, business, ethics, and cognition, not technology. Partway through reading them, I started recognizing a pattern; how people evaluate whether our docs, or an AI answer, is any good.
People who rely on implicit communication — the “everybody knows” move — create the conditions for miscommunication without meaning to. That was obvious to me once I made the connection between ambiguity and understanding that several of the authors touched on. But because of the way my brain jumps from one tangentially-related topic to another, I began to wonder if same implicit-versus-explicit gap in documentation might help (at least partially) explain why AI answer engines produce so-called hallucinations?
