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Similar suggestions have been made over and over, and they've never stuck. "Hallucinating" has already hit mainstream media. It's probably going to stay that wa
by BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
Similar suggestions have been made over and over, and they've never stuck. "Hallucinating" has already hit mainstream media. It's probably going to stay that way out of sheer inertia because nobody outside of a small group of nerds on hackernews is going to sit down and think about whether "hallucinating" or "confabulating" more accurately describes the nature of the error. The existing term already captures the general idea well enough.
- faichai 3y agoHard disagree. I’m browsing the internet not surfing the Information Super Highway. Mainstream media needs to rely less on allegory once technology becomes mainstream.
- krapp 3y agoLLMs aren't mainstream yet. When they are, it will simply be common cultural knowledge that they can (lie,hallucinate,confabulate,whatever) and metaphors won't be necessary, the way the internet became mainstream once it was common knowledge not to "feed trolls" or "click on spam." At the moment, most people still think LLMs are basically like the computers from Star Trek, rational, sentient and always correct. Like those lawyers who used ChatGPT to generate legal arguments - it didn't even occur to them that AI could fabricate data, they assumed it was just a search engine you could talk to like a person. This is why we still need metaphors to spread cultural knowledge. To that end I think it's less important to be technically accurate than to impart an idea clearly. "Hallucinate" and "confabulate" get the same point across, but the former is more widely understood. Even "confabulate" isn't great, since it carries the connotation of either deception or senility/mental illness. But the "confabulation" of LLMs is inherent to their design. They aren't intended to discern truth, or accuracy, but statistical similarity to a stream of language tokens. And humans don't really do that, so we don't really have language fit to describe how LLMs operate without resorting to anthropomorphism and metaphors from human behavior.
- dtech 3y agoBut hallucinating is not an allegory... Just like we're still using browsing.
- chriswarbo 3y ago> I’m browsing the internet not surfing the Information Super Highway. Hard disagree. You're browsing the Web not exploring the Internet.
- m0rissette 3y agoAnd here I thought us nerds ruled the world.
- quantified 3y agoThe millenium parties were all on New Year's Eve of 2000, not New Year's Eve of 2001. Some nerds had to be worrying about Y2K date/time bugs instead of partying too.
- karmakaze 3y agoThe true nerds would be partying the next year with the millinium ending/beggining on Jan 1, 2001.
- quantified 3y agoExactly. Pretty lonely endeavor.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y agoWhat exact date do you think "New Year's Eve of 2000" is? 2000-12-31?
- quantified 3y agoIt was the eve of the new year, the evening that started at the end of 1999-12-31 and ended in time for brunch on 2000-01-01. I was partying with the fun people after arguing the numbers for a few days in 1998 or 1999.