3 ms·
The problem with hallucinations is that they really are an expected part of what LLMs are used for today. "Write me a story about the first kangaroo on the moo
by simonw 1y ago
The problem with hallucinations is that they really are an expected part of what LLMs are used for today.
"Write me a story about the first kangaroo on the moon" - that's a direct request for a hallucination, something that's never actually happened.
"Write me a story about the first man on the moon" - that could be interpreted as "a made-up children's story about Neil Armstrong".
"Tell me about the first man on the moon" - that's a request for factual information.
All of the above are reasonable requests of an LLM. Are we asking for a variant of an LLM that can flat refuse the first prompt because it's asking for non-real information?
Even summarizing an article could be considered a hallucination: there's a truth in the world, which is the exact text of that article. Then there's the made-up shortened version which omits certain details to act as a summary. What would a "hallucination free" LLM do with that?
I would argue that what we actually want here is for LLMs to get better over time at not presenting made-up information as fact in answer to clear requests for factual information. And that's what we've been getting - GPT-5 is far less likely to invent things in response to a factual question than GPT-4 was.
- janalsncm 1y ago> What would a "hallucination free" LLM do with that? To me, there’s a qualitative question of what details to include. Ideally the most important ones. And there’s the binary question of whether it included details not in the original. A related issue is that preference tuning loves wordy responses, even if they’re factually equivalent.
- steelcastles 1y ago[dead]