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I still think confabulation is a better term for what LLMs do than hallucination. Hallucination - A hallucination is a false perception where a person senses s
by irrational 1y ago
I still think confabulation is a better term for what LLMs do than hallucination.
Hallucination - A hallucination is a false perception where a person senses something that isn't actually there, affecting any of the five senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, or taste. These experiences can seem very real to the person experiencing them, even though they are not based on external stimuli.
Confabulation - Confabulation is a memory error consisting of the production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world. It is generally associated with certain types of brain damage or a specific subset of dementias.
- maxbond 1y agoI think "apophenia" (attributing meaning to spurious connections) or "pareidolia" (the form of aphonenia where we see faces where there are none) would have been good choices, as well.
- cratermoon 1y agoanthropoglossic systems.
- Terr_ 1y agoLargely Logorrhea Models.
- bluefirebrand 1y agoYou're not wrong in a strict sense, but you have to remember that most people aren't that strict about language I would bet that for most people they define the words like: Hallucination - something that isn't real Confabulation - a word that they have never heard of
- static_void 1y agoWe should not bend over backwards to use language the way ignorant people do.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago"Bending over backwards" is a pretty ignorant metaphor for this situation, it describes explicit activity whereas letting people use metaphor loosely only requires passivity.
- furyofantares 1y agoI like communicating with people using a shared understanding of the words being used, even if I have an additional, different understanding of the words, which I can use with other people. That's what words are, anyway.
- dingnuts 1y agoI like calling it bullshit[0] because it's the most accurate, most understandable, and the most fun to use with a footnote 0 (featured previously on HN) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
- rad_gruchalski 1y agoIgnorance is easy to hide behind many words.
- static_void 1y agoI'm glad we can agree. I also like communicating with people using a shared understanding of the words being used, i.e. their definitions.
- furyofantares 1y agoYou might be interested to learn that the people who write down the definitions in dictionaries consider themselves to be in the business of documenting usage, not bringing commandments on stone tablets down from the mountain.
- static_void 1y ago
- resonious 1y agoI would go one step further and suppose that a lot of people just don't know what confabulation means.
- rollcat 1y agoThere's a simpler word for that: lying. It's also equally wrong. Lying implies intent. Stop anthropomorphising language models.
- sorcerer-mar 1y agoLying is different from confabulation. As you say, lying implies intent. Confabulation does not necessarily, ergo it's a far better word than either lying or hallucinating. A person with dementia confabulates a lot, which entails describing reality "incorrectly";, but it's not quite fair to describe it as lying.
- rollcat 1y agoI took note, and I agree. The problem is that (as a non-native English speaker), I had to look the word up. I'm concerned that this nuance could escape people, even when they know what the word stands for. "Making things up" is precise but wordy. "Lying" is good enough, obvious, and concise.
- bandrami 1y agoA liar seeks to hide the truth; a confabulator is indifferent to the truth entirely. It's an important distinction. True statements can still be confabulations.
- matkoniecz 1y agoAnd why confabulation is better one of those?
- bee_rider 1y agoIt seems like these are all anthropomorphic euphemisms for things that would otherwise be described as bugs, errors (in the “broken program” sense), or error (in the “accumulation of numerical error” sense), if LLMs didn’t have the easy-to-anthropomorphize chat interface.
- diggan 1y agoImagine you have function that is called "is_true" but it only gets it right 60% of the time. We're doing this within CS/ML, so lets call that "correctness" or something fancier. In order for that function to be valuable, would we need to hit a 100% in correctness? I mean probably most of the time, yeah. But sometimes, maybe even rarely, we're fine with it being less than 100%, but still as high as possible. So in this point of view, it's not a bug or error that it currently sits at 60%, but if we manage to find a way to hit 70%, it would be better. But in order to figure this out, we need to call this "correct for most part, but could be better" concept something. So we look at what we already know and are familiar with, and try to draw parallels, maybe even borrow some names/words.
- bee_rider 1y agoThis doesn’t seem too different from my third thing, error (in the “accumulation of numerical error” sense).
- timewizard 1y ago> but if we manage to find a way to hit 70%, it would be better. Yet still absolutely worthless. > "correct for most part, but could be better" concept something. When humans do that we just call it "an error." > so lets call that "correctness" or something The appropriate term is "confidence." These LLM tools all could give you a confidence rating with each and every "fact" it attempts to relay to you. Of course they don't actually do that because no one would use a tool that confidently gives you answers based on a 70% self confidence rating. We can quibble over terms but more appropriately this is just "garbage." It's a giant waste of energy and resources that produces flawed results. All of that money and effort could be better used elsewhere.
- JimDabell 1y agoConfabulation is a good term for the majority of what is currently termed AI hallucinations, but there is still a good proportion that is accurately called hallucination. For instance, if you give AI a photo and ask it to describe in detail what it seems, it will often report things that aren’t there. That’s not confabulation, that’s hallucination. But if you ask a general knowledge question with no additional context and it responds with something untrue, then that would be confabulation, I agree.
- nurettin 1y agoIIRC The reason it was originally called a hallucination was due to experiments like "clone github.com/bleh/blah" and it would give you a non-existent repository. You could list and edit the files and so on. Or you would ask it to list files in your home dir and go three directories deep and it would keep on generating.
- xyzal 1y agoTaking into account the output usually has the structure of being an expert output (probably because of its correctness language-wise and from a formal standpoint), I propose "bullshitting".
- latexr 1y ago> I still think confabulation is a better term for what LLMs do than hallucination. That battle is both lost and irrelevant. Don’t confuse accurate word usage with effective communication, most people don’t understand the nuance between hallucination and confabulation nor do they care. Even if you convinced everyone in the world to start using “confabulation” right now, nothing would change. You’re doing a disservice to your own cause by insisting on this pointless weak distinction. If you truly want to make a point about the issue with LLMs in a way anyone outside of HN might pay attention, suggest a simpler and stronger word people already know: “lying”, “bullshitting”, … You can surely object to those suggestions: “LLMs don’t lie. That would require active deception which they are incapable of, being statistical token generators”. Which is true, but: 1. There are plenty of people who both believe LLMs are intelligent and capable of deception. 2. For everyone else, “bullshitted” is no more inaccurate than “hallucinated” yet still conveys a stronger urgency and required care of operation.