I always took exception to the word “hallucination” with respect to LLMs anyway - they aren’t databases of facts, they’re language models, trained to be really,

I always took exception to the word “hallucination” with respect to LLMs anyway - they aren’t databases of facts, they’re language models, trained to be really, really good mimics of human communication. As such, while they are trained on an existing corpus that no doubt contains many facts and many falsehoods, their task is to produce more material that looks like this corpus, not be a source of truth. So an LLM “hallucinating” or confabulating is not some aberrant behaviour, it’s fundamental to the nature of the beast. It always worries me when people say they’re using an LLM as a search engine or source of knowledge.