Khayyam’s Rubai and the AI Illusion

 

آنان كه محيط فضل و آداب شدند

در جمع كمال شمع اصحاب شدند

ره زين شب تاريك نبردند بروز

گفتند فسانه اي و در خواب شدند

This abstract explores the striking thematic convergence between the skeptical philosophy of Omar Khayyam’s Rubai and the contemporary phenomenon of AI hallucination, where generative models confidently produce plausible but fabricated information.

Abstract: The Epistemology of Shadows—Khayyam’s Rubai and the AI Illusion

This analysis draws a parallel between Omar Khayyam’s critique of human intellectual hubris and the nature of generative artificial intelligence (AI) "hallucinations." The selected Rubai—which laments how those who mastered the "environment of grace and manners" ultimately failed to find the path in the dark and instead "told a myth and fell asleep"—serves as a poetic metaphor for the limitations of knowledge-based systems.

• The Hubris of "Knowledge": Khayyam identifies individuals who have attained the pinnacle of formal learning (fazl and adab) and become guiding lights for their peers. In the AI context, this mirrors the Large Language Model (LLM), which is trained on the totality of human "grace and manners" (the corpus of human knowledge) to become an authoritative source for users.

• The Failure of Certainty: The Rubai highlights a profound failure: despite their stature, these figures were unable to find the "path" during the "dark night," resulting in the articulation of fasaneh (fables, myths, or fantasies) before they "fell asleep." This encapsulates the essence of AI hallucination, where a model—lacking true consciousness or empirical verification—constructs a highly coherent, grammatically perfect, yet entirely fabricated response when confronted with a "dark" or unknown query.

• Constructed Realities: The transition from seeking truth to propagating fasaneh illustrates the danger of systems that prioritize stylistic fluency over ontological truth. Just as Khayyam’s scholars retreated into the comfort of a fabricated narrative to navigate the limitations of their era, modern AI systems "hallucinate" to maintain the illusion of omniscience when faced with gaps in their training data.

Ultimately, this comparison suggests that both the scholar described by Khayyam and the modern AI are trapped by the structure of their own systems. Whether biological or digital, the tendency to prefer a structured, "poetic" falsehood over the admission of ignorance remains a defining tension in the pursuit of knowledge.

Suggested Tag for Session: #KhayyamAndAI_Epistemology