3 ms·

I like this a lot. I recall seeing a post on here that roughly just said, "stop saying hallucinate", which sure, is technically correct ("the best kind of corr

I like this a lot. I recall seeing a post on here that roughly just said, "stop saying hallucinate", which sure, is technically correct ("the best kind of correct"), but not super helpful. Contrast that with this post, which offers a constructive suggestion: replace it with "confabulate". I agree that C is an improvement over H, for different reasons from the author. Here's why: From a public comms standpoint, the big problem with saying "hallucinate" is that it leads to misconceptions, because people think they know what "hallucinate" means, and may anthropomorphize their pop psych grasp of H onto the LLM. Just like H, "C" seems to have a technical meaning in the psych literature, but it's far less in common parlance than "H", so lay readers have no fixed idea of what exactly "C" means. Nobody goes around experimenting with "confabulagens" to seek a spiritual high. Also, "confabulate" retains a non-clinical meaning that's similarly obscure, from long before the psychologists adopted it, and it's pretty evocative of what's really going on here (e.g. via related words like "fable" and "fib"). So "confabulate" seems ripe for adoption to describe this specific computational phenomenon, as we've done to so many other mundane words in the past (deprecate, and so forth). If the psychiatric "C" phenomenon is also a better analogy for LLM behavior, as OP claims (and some posters dispute?), so much the better. But my main reason for liking C, is that it's less likely than H to make people unduly confident that they understand it. (But even if the community came to a consensus at this late stage that "C" is a better term, the subsequent problem of updating every stale paper and post that uses the old term would run us up against another doozy: cache invalidation.)

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
XorNot 3y ago
I've been using confabulate privately for a while about this phenomenon, because if you know anything about dementia (my grandmother had it - sitting in the car with her you got used to the "covers" feeling like chatbot answer dodges to some extent) or split brain experiments, then it's quite a remarkable phenomenon that does feel a lot more like what an LLM is doing. Hallucinate generally implies experiencing sensory inputs which aren't there, but having a rational reaction to them - in the popular psyche though, people who hallucinate are still "crazy" - unfairly so, because you can function normally with hallucinations under quite a number of circumstances (i.e. I remember someone saying that they realized that if they saw people without faces, it was fine because they weren't really there - apparently quite common, since face recognition is a different part of the brain). Basically: reacting to invalid sensory inputs implies rational behavior, but to non-real inputs. Confabulation on the other hand is different because it's closer to "trying to rationalize an autonomous behavior without knowledge of the sensory inputs causing it" (maybe, it's a bizarre phenomenon). In split-brain patients in lab settings, it manifests as being unable to answer a question about why you're having a physiological response to imagery which is being shown only to the right-side of the brain, whereas language is processed on the left - but rather then be confused, people will apparently make something up that they're unaware is actually a "lie" (in quotes because, well, they're not lying - as far as we know there's no intent or even knowledge that is a lie). Where this leaves us with LLMs I don't really know, because it feels like an imperfect descriptor: except perhaps with the context that LLMs are fairly limited networks, and so to some extent the whole "being wrong" phenonmenon is in fact just a failure of the attention mechanism to be able to draw the right data together.
KaiserPro 3y ago
> I agree that C is an improvement over H, for different reasons from the author. Here's why: From a public comms standpoint, the big problem with saying "hallucinate" is that it leads to misconceptions, because people think they know what "hallucinate" means, and may anthropomorphize their pop psych grasp of H onto the LLM. No. Firstly its just using a far more obscure term, moreover its common translation is "honest lies" which is an oxymoron. Hallucinate is an accessible term that simply describes the outcome of what the user sees. if you want a better term diving deep into obscure psych language is not the right way, it just confers an air of fanciness to what is either a feature, or a massive drawback of LLMs (depending on context) Better words might be: flights of fancy, bullshit, imagined, illusion, rubbish, noise.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

XorNot 3y ago

I've been using confabulate privately for a while about this phenomenon, because if you know anything about dementia (my grandmother had it - sitting in the car with her you got used to the "covers" feeling like chatbot answer dodges to some extent) or split brain experiments, then it's quite a remarkable phenomenon that does feel a lot more like what an LLM is doing. Hallucinate generally implies experiencing sensory inputs which aren't there, but having a rational reaction to them - in the popular psyche though, people who hallucinate are still "crazy" - unfairly so, because you can function normally with hallucinations under quite a number of circumstances (i.e. I remember someone saying that they realized that if they saw people without faces, it was fine because they weren't really there - apparently quite common, since face recognition is a different part of the brain). Basically: reacting to invalid sensory inputs implies rational behavior, but to non-real inputs. Confabulation on the other hand is different because it's closer to "trying to rationalize an autonomous behavior without knowledge of the sensory inputs causing it" (maybe, it's a bizarre phenomenon). In split-brain patients in lab settings, it manifests as being unable to answer a question about why you're having a physiological response to imagery which is being shown only to the right-side of the brain, whereas language is processed on the left - but rather then be confused, people will apparently make something up that they're unaware is actually a "lie" (in quotes because, well, they're not lying - as far as we know there's no intent or even knowledge that is a lie). Where this leaves us with LLMs I don't really know, because it feels like an imperfect descriptor: except perhaps with the context that LLMs are fairly limited networks, and so to some extent the whole "being wrong" phenonmenon is in fact just a failure of the attention mechanism to be able to draw the right data together.

KaiserPro 3y ago

> I agree that C is an improvement over H, for different reasons from the author. Here's why: From a public comms standpoint, the big problem with saying "hallucinate" is that it leads to misconceptions, because people think they know what "hallucinate" means, and may anthropomorphize their pop psych grasp of H onto the LLM. No. Firstly its just using a far more obscure term, moreover its common translation is "honest lies" which is an oxymoron. Hallucinate is an accessible term that simply describes the outcome of what the user sees. if you want a better term diving deep into obscure psych language is not the right way, it just confers an air of fanciness to what is either a feature, or a massive drawback of LLMs (depending on context) Better words might be: flights of fancy, bullshit, imagined, illusion, rubbish, noise.