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Inventiveness/creativity/imagination are deliberate things. LLM "hallucinations" are more akin to a student looking at a test over material they only 70% rememb

Inventiveness/creativity/imagination are deliberate things. LLM "hallucinations" are more akin to a student looking at a test over material they only 70% remember grabbing at what they think is the most likely correct answer. More "willful hope in the face of forgetting" than "creativity." Many LLM hallucinations - especially of the coding sort - are ones that would be obviously-wrong based on the training material, but the hundreds of languages/libraries/frameworks the thing was trained on start to blur together and there is not precise 100%-memorization recall but instead a "probably something like this" guess. It's not "inventive" to assume one math library will have the same functions as another, it's just losing sight of specific details.

ForTheKidz 2y ago
> Inventiveness/creativity/imagination are deliberate things. Not really. At least, it's just as much a reflex as any other human behavior to my perception. Anyway, why does intention—although I think this is mostly nonsensical/incoherent/a category error applied to LLMs—even matter to you? Either we have no goals and we're just idly discussing random word games (aka philosophy), which is fine with me, or we do have goals and whether or not you believe the software is intelligent or not is irrelevant. In the latter case anthropomorphizing discussion with words like "hallucination", "obviously", "deliberate", etc are just going to cause massive friction, distraction, and confusion. Why can't people be satisfied with "bad output"?
TeMPOraL 2y ago
> LLM "hallucinations" are more akin to a student looking at a test over material they only 70% remember grabbing at what they think is the most likely correct answer. AKA. extrapolation. AKA. what everyone is doing to a lesser or greater degree, when consequences of stopping are worse than of getting this wrong. That's not just the case of school, where giving up because you "don't know" is guaranteed F, while extrapolating has a non-zero chance of scoring you anything between F and A. It's also the case in everyday life, where you do things incrementally - getting the wrong answer is a stepping stone to getting a less wrong answer in the next attempt. We do that at every scale - from inner thought process all the way to large-scale engineering. Hardly anyone learns 100% of the material, because that's just plain memorization. We're always extrapolating from incomplete information; more studying and more experience (and more smarts) just makes us more likely to get it right. > It's not "inventive" to assume one math library will have the same functions as another, it's just losing sight of specific details. Depends. To a large extent, this kind of "hallucinations" is what a good programmer is supposed to be doing. That is, code to the API you'd like to have, inventing functions and classes convenient to you if they don't exist, and then see how to make this work - which, in one place, means fixing your own call sites, and in another, building utilities or a whole compat layer between your code and the actual API.

ForTheKidz 2y ago

> Inventiveness/creativity/imagination are deliberate things. Not really. At least, it's just as much a reflex as any other human behavior to my perception. Anyway, why does intention—although I think this is mostly nonsensical/incoherent/a category error applied to LLMs—even matter to you? Either we have no goals and we're just idly discussing random word games (aka philosophy), which is fine with me, or we do have goals and whether or not you believe the software is intelligent or not is irrelevant. In the latter case anthropomorphizing discussion with words like "hallucination", "obviously", "deliberate", etc are just going to cause massive friction, distraction, and confusion. Why can't people be satisfied with "bad output"?

TeMPOraL 2y ago

> LLM "hallucinations" are more akin to a student looking at a test over material they only 70% remember grabbing at what they think is the most likely correct answer. AKA. extrapolation. AKA. what everyone is doing to a lesser or greater degree, when consequences of stopping are worse than of getting this wrong. That's not just the case of school, where giving up because you "don't know" is guaranteed F, while extrapolating has a non-zero chance of scoring you anything between F and A. It's also the case in everyday life, where you do things incrementally - getting the wrong answer is a stepping stone to getting a less wrong answer in the next attempt. We do that at every scale - from inner thought process all the way to large-scale engineering. Hardly anyone learns 100% of the material, because that's just plain memorization. We're always extrapolating from incomplete information; more studying and more experience (and more smarts) just makes us more likely to get it right. > It's not "inventive" to assume one math library will have the same functions as another, it's just losing sight of specific details. Depends. To a large extent, this kind of "hallucinations" is what a good programmer is supposed to be doing. That is, code to the API you'd like to have, inventing functions and classes convenient to you if they don't exist, and then see how to make this work - which, in one place, means fixing your own call sites, and in another, building utilities or a whole compat layer between your code and the actual API.