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No, if I ask a human about something he doesn't know, the first thing he will think about is not a made up answer, it is "I don't know". It actually takes effor
by GuB-42 2y ago
No, if I ask a human about something he doesn't know, the first thing he will think about is not a made up answer, it is "I don't know". It actually takes effort to make up a story, and without training we tend to be pretty bad at it. Some people do it naturally, but it is considered a disorder.
For LLMs, there is no concept of "not knowing", they will just write something that best matches their training data, and since there is not much "I don't know" in their training data, it is not a natural answer.
For example, I asked for a list of bars in a small city the LLM clearly didn't know much about, and gave me a nice list with names, addresses, phone numbers, etc... all hallucinated. Try to ask a normal human to give you a list of bars in a city he doesn't know well enough, and force him to answer something plausible, no "I don't know". Eventually, especially if he knows a lot about bars, you will get an answer, but it absolutely won't be his first thought, he will probably need to think hard about it.
- pessimizer 2y ago> No, if I ask a human about something he doesn't know, the first thing he will think about is not a made up answer, it is "I don't know". You've just made this up, through. It's not what happens. How would somebody even know that they didn't know without trying to come up with an answer? But maybe more convincingly, people who have brain injuries that cause them to neglect a side (i.e. not see the left or right side of things) often don't realize (without a lot of convincing) the extent to which this is happening. If you ask them to explain their unexplainable behaviors, they'll spontaneously concoct the most convincing explanation that they can. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispatial_neglect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispatial_neglect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia People try to make things make sense. LLMs try to minimize a loss function.
- IshKebab 2y agoRubbish. Humans absolutely hallucinate things, including lists of bars. Most of them do it infrequently but it absolutely happens. Sometimes they don't even realise it (see all the research about fictitious memories and eye witness accounts). It's definitely a problem that LLMs hallucinate all the time, but let's not pretend humans are perfect and never bullshit. Hell, I've worked with one awful guy who did bullshit just as much as LLMs. Literally never said "I don't know". Always some answer that you were never sure was true or just entirely made up. Annoyingly it worked quite well for him - lots of people couldn't see through it.