4 ms·
A bit off topic, but am I the only one unhappy about the choice of the word "hallucinate" to describe the phenomenon of LLMs saying things that are false? The
by jp57 2y ago
A bit off topic, but am I the only one unhappy about the choice of the word "hallucinate" to describe the phenomenon of LLMs saying things that are false?
The verb has always meant experiencing false sensations or perceptions, not saying false things. If a person were to speak to you without regard for whether what they said was true, you'd say they were bulshitting you, not hallucinating.
- strangescript 2y agoWhat if that person firmly believes what they say is true?
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoThe thing saying it is not a person, and has no beliefs. The problem is basically epistemology. GPTs don't have any. Arguably they don't know anything. (Arguably they do to an extent, because the knowledge is encoded in the words in the training data.) But even if they know things, they don't know that they know, and so they cannot tell between "knowing" and "not knowing".
- strangescript 2y agoThis is all semantic bullshit. I could raise a child devoid of any outside contact and teach them that klingons enslave our people and we must hide in the woods. Things you see in the skies are their hunting machines. They could completely "know that" and its a total fabrication.
- function_seven 2y agoBullshitting implies knowing that you're lying. Some sort of malice or intention to deceive. Hallucinating means the LLM really "thinks" that you can use PVA glue in a pizza recipe. It's not trying to screw you over. It's just that the token generator has found a weird path through the training set. (I'm sure I didn't word that last sentence correctly) I think "hallucinate" is a spot-on description of what's happening under the hood.
- jp57 2y agoI don't think people use "bullshitting" interchangably with "lying". I'm partial to this characterization: So bullshitting isn’t just nonsense. It’s constructed in order to appear meaningful, though on closer examination, it isn’t. And bullshit isn’t the same as lying. A liar knows the truth but makes statements deliberately intended to sell people on falsehoods. bullshitters, in contrast, aren’t concerned about what’s true or not, so much as they’re trying to appear as if they know what they’re talking about. ... [W]hen people speak from a position of disproportionate confidence about their knowledge relative to what little they actually know, bullshit is often the result. [1] Doesn't this description like what LLMs do all the time? [1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psych-unseen/202007/the-psychology-bullshit https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psych-unseen/202007/...
- function_seven 2y agoYeah I missed the nuance on the other side. If I know 80% of a subject, I can sometimes convince myself that I'm capable of "filling in the gaps" with on-the-fly constructions. But because "bullshitting" has some sorta agency behind it, while "hallucinating" is a thing that happens to you, I still lean toward the latter. But even better are the other replies that suggest "confabulation." "Hallucination" just sounds so nicely dystopian as we start to think about our coming AI overlords.
- DonaldFisk 2y ago> Bullshitting implies knowing that you're lying. Harry Frankfurt had a more useful definition of bullshitting. The essence of it is that while liars care about the truth and intend to deceive, bullshitters don't know or care about the truth - they want to impress, or avoid looking stupid, or something similar. Hallucination is clearly the wrong word here, as is lying. Bullshitting isn't much better. Confabulation, however, is very close to what LLMs are doing when they make up stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation
- iknownthing 2y agoHow about just "misprediction"?
- pacificmint 2y agoIf you ask the model what the color of grass is, and it answers blue, then that would indeed be false (or maybe a lie). I think most people wouldn’t call that a hallucination. But if you ask it for a court case, and it makes up a whole false case file with fake names and fake facts and everything, then calling that ‘false’ seems to be an understatement. Hallucination seems a good label for that kind of thing, imo.
- PretzelPirate 2y ago> but am I the only one unhappy about the choice of the word "hallucinate" to describe the phenomenon of LLMs saying things that are false? This has been discussed quite a bit and some people have decided that 'confabulation' is a better term.