3 ms·
> Probably for the best that users see the words "Sorry, I hallucinated" every now and then. Wouldn’t “sorry, I don’t know how to answer the question” be bette
by xienze 2y ago
> Probably for the best that users see the words "Sorry, I hallucinated" every now and then.
Wouldn’t “sorry, I don’t know how to answer the question” be better?
- SatvikBeri 2y agoThat requires more confidence. If there's a 50% chance something is true, I'd rather have Claude guess and give a warning than say it doesn't know how to answer.
- creatonez 2y agoNot necessarily. The LLM doesn't know what it can answer before it tries to. So in some cases it might be better to make an attempt and then later characterize it as a hallucination, so that the error doesn't spill over and produce even more incoherent nonsense. The chatbot admitting that it "hallucinated" is a strong indication to itself that part of the previous text is literal nonsense and cannot be trusted, and that it needs to take another approach.
- lemming 2y ago"Sorry, I just made that up" is more accurate.
- throw310822 2y agoAnd it reveals how "hallucinations" are a quite common occurrence also for humans.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoSpecifically, "hallucinations" are very common in humans; we usually don't call it "making things up" (as in, intentionally), but rather we call it "talking faster than you think" or "talking at the speed of thought". Which is pretty much what LLMs do.
- adastra22 2y agoYeah an LLM is basically doing what you would do with the prompt “I’m going to ask you a question, give your best off the cuff response, pulling details entirely from memory without double-checking anything.” Then when it gets something wrong we jump on it and say it was hallucinating. As if we wouldn’t make the same mistakes.
- kortilla 2y agoIt’s not like that at all. Hallucinations are complete fabrications because the weights happened to land there. It has nothing to do with how much thought or double checking there is. You can trick an LLM into “double checking” an already valid answer and get it to return nonsense hallucinations instead.
- adastra22 2y agoThat’s how your brain works at the base level too.
- chilling 2y agoIT WAS JUST A PRANK BRO! JUST A PRANK
- fennecfoxy 2y agoNah I think hallucination better. Hopefully it gives more of a prod to the people who easily forget it's a machine. It's been argued that LLMs are parrots, but just look the the meat bag that asks one a question, receives an answer biased to their query and then parrots the misinformation to anybody that'll listen.