> but rather are hallucinatory for some other interesting reason. In improv theater, the actor's job is to come up with plausible interactions. They are free t

> but rather are hallucinatory for some other interesting reason. In improv theater, the actor's job is to come up with plausible interactions. They are free to make shit up as they go along, hence improv, but they have to keep their inventions plausible to what had just happened before. So in improv if someone asks you "What is an eggplant?" it is perfectly okay to say "An eggplant is what you get when you genetically splice together an egg and a cucumber" or similar. It's nonsense but it's nonsense that follows nicely from what just came before. Large language models, especially interactive ones, are a kind of improv theater by machine: the machine outputs something statistically plausible to what had just come before; what "statistically plausible" means is based on the data about human conversations that came from the internet. But if there are gaps in the data, or the data lacks a specific answer that seems to statistically dominate, it seems like giving a definitive answer is more plausible in the language model than saying "I don't know", so the machine selects definitive, but wrong, answers.