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AI professor here. I know this page is a joke, but in the interest of accuracy, a terminological comment: we don't call it a "hallucination" if a model complies
by jll29 10mo ago
AI professor here. I know this page is a joke, but in the interest of accuracy, a terminological comment: we don't call it a "hallucination" if a model complies exactly with what a prompt asked for and produces a prediction, exactly as requested.
Rater, "hallucinations" are spurious replacements of factual knowledge with fictional material caused by the use of statistical process (the pseudo random number generator used with the "temperature" parameter of neural transformers): token prediction without meaning representation.
[typo fixed]
- nunodonato 10mo agowouldn't the right term be 'confabulation'?
- rat9988 10mo agoNo, still too negatively connoted. "Writes" "Predicts" "caricatures" is closer.
- DonHopkins 10mo agoLatin: Extraclaudiposteriorifabricátio Pronunciation: ex-tra-clau-dee-pos-TE-ri-o-ri-fa-bri-KA-tee-o Meaning: "The act of fabricating something by pulling it from one’s posterior." extra- = out of claudi- (from claudere, close/shut) repurposed for “the closed place” posterior- = the backside fabricatio = fabrication, invention German: Poausdenkungsherausziehungsmachwerk Pronunciation: POH-ows-den-kungs-heh-RAUS-tsee-oongs-MAHKH-verk Meaning: "A contrived creation pulled out of the butt by thinking it up." Po = butt Ausdenkungs- = thinking-up Herausziehung = pulling-out Machwerk = contrived creation Klingon: puchvo’vangDI’moHchu’ghach Pronunciation: POOKH-vo vang-DEE-moakh-CHU-ghakh (roll the gh, hit the q hard, and use that throat ch like clearing your bat’leth sinuses) Meaning: "The perfected act of boldly claiming something pulled out from the butt." puch = toilet (a real Klingon word) -vo’ = from vang = act, behave, assert (real root) -DI’ = when (adds timing spice) -moH = cause/make -chu’ = perfectly / clearly / expertly -ghach = turns a verb phrase into a noun (canonical nominalizer)
- bluejay2387 10mo agoWant to second this. Asking the model to create a work of fiction and it complying isn't a pathology. Mozart wasn't "hallucinating" when he created "The Marriage of Figaro".
- Olreich 10mo agoBut many artists are hallucinating when they envisioned some of their pieces. Who's to say Mozart wasn't on a trip when he created The Marriage of Figaro.
- jb1991 10mo agoThat would have to be a very very long hallucination because it’s a huge opera that took a long time to write.
- DonHopkins 10mo agoBill Atkinson was hallucinating when he envisioned HyperCard. https://patternproject.substack.com/p/from-the-mac-to-the-mystical-bill https://patternproject.substack.com/p/from-the-mac-to-the-my... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44530767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44530767
- intrasight 10mo agoWe don't know Mozart's state of mind when he composed. He didn't hallucinate the Marriage of Figaro but he may well have been hallucinating.
- articlepan 10mo agoI agree with your first paragraph, but not your second. Models can still hallucinate when temperature is set to zero (aka when we always choose the highest probability token from the model's output token distribution). In my mind, hallucination is when some aspect of the model's response should be consistent with reality but is not, and the reality-inconsistent information is not directly attributable or deducible from (mis)information in the pre-training corpus. While hallucination can be triggered by setting the temperature high, it can also be the result of many possible deficiencies in model pre- and post- training that result in the model outputting bad token probability distributions.
- ActivePattern 10mo agoI've never heard the caveat that it can't be attributable to misinformation in the pre-training corpus. For frontier models, we don't even have access to the enormous training corpus, so we would have no way of verifying whether or not it is regurgitating some misinformation that it had seen there or whether it is inventing something out of whole cloth.
- Aurornis 10mo ago> I've never heard the caveat that it can't be attributable to misinformation in the pre-training corpus. If the LLM is accurately reflecting the training corpus, it wouldn’t be considered a hallucination. The LLM is operating as designed. Matters of access to the training corpus are a separate issue.
- parineum 10mo agoThe LLM is always operating as designed. All LLM outputs are "hallucinations".
- Al-Khwarizmi 10mo agoThe LLM is always operating as designed, but humans call its outputs "hallucinations" when they don't align with factual reality, regardless of the reason why that happens and whether it should be considered a bug or a feature. (I don't like the term much, by the way, but at this point it's a de facto standard).
- ayewo 10mo agoTerminology-wise, does this read like a better title instead?: Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 generates the HN front page 10 years from now
- tim333 10mo agoI'd vote for imagines.
- locknitpicker 10mo ago> Terminology-wise, does this read like a better title instead?: Generates does not convey any info on the nature of the process used to create the output. In this context, extrapolates or predicts or explores sound more suitable. But nitpicking over these words is pointless and represents going off on a tangent. The use of the term "hallucination" reffers to the specific mechanism used to generate this type of output. Just like prompting a model to transcode a document and thus generating an output that doesn't match any established format.
- Obscurity4340 10mo agoWouldnt confabulate/confabulations be a better term in substitute for "hallucinating"?
- saberience 10mo agoThe OP clearly didn't mean "hallucination" as a bug or error in the AI, in the way you're suggesting. Words can have many different meanings! You can easily say, Johnny had some wild hallucinations about a future where Elon Musk ruled the world. It just means it was some wild speculative thinking. I read this title in this sense of the world. Not everything has to be nit-picked or overanalysed. This is an amusing article with an amusing title.
- hbn 10mo ago"Hallucination" has always seemed like a misnomer to me anyway considering LLMs don't know anything. They just impressively get things right enough to be useful assuming you audit the output. If anything, I think all of their output should be called a hallucination.
- Workaccount2 10mo agoWe don't know if anything knows anything because we don't know what knowing is.
- alamortsubite 10mo agoOn the other hand, once you're operating under the model of not knowing if anything knows anything, there's really no point in posting about it here, is there?
- stingraycharles 10mo agoThis is just something that sounds profound but really isn’t. Knowing is actually the easiest part to define and explain. Intelligence / understanding is much more difficult to define.
- shagie 10mo agoI took a semester long 500 level class back in college on the theory of knowledge. It is not easy to define - the entire branch of epistemology in philosophy deals with that question. ... To that end, I'd love to be able to revisit my classes from back then (computer science, philosophy (two classes from a double major), and a smattering of linguistics) with the world state of today's technologies.
- anonymous_sorry 10mo agoOthers have suggested "bullshit". A bullshitter does not care (and may not know) whether what they say is truth or fiction. A bullshitter's goal is just to be listened to and seem convincing.
- psychoslave 10mo agoIn French we call that kind of practices "affabulations". Maybe fraud, deception or deceit are the closest matching translations for this context. That is what the LLM are molded to do (of course). But this is also the insistence by informed people to unceasingly use fallacious vocabulary. Sure a bit of analogy can be didactic, but the current trend is rather to leverage on every occasion to spread the impression that LLM works with processes similar to human thoughts. A good analogy also communicate the fact that it is a mere analogy. So carrying the metaphor is only going to accumulate more delusion than comprehension.
- jotaen 10mo agoTo me, “imagine” would have been a more fitting term here. (“Generate”, while correct, sounds too technical, and “confabulate” reads a bit obscure.)
- tangwwwei 10mo ago"imagine" gives too much credence of humanity to this action which will continue the cognitive mistake we make of anthropomorphzing llms
- doe88 10mo agoExactly! At first this is the precise reason I didn't click through as I thought from the title, a page must have been somehow outputted/hallucinated by error, but luckily I then saw the number of votes, revised my choice and saw a great page. I'm partial though, loving Haskell myself (as a monad_lover) i'm happy it wasn't forgotten too :)
- mihaaly 10mo agoInteresting. There are AI professors out there already!
- dang 10mo ago(I should have thought of this yesterday but have just replaced 'hallucinates' with 'imagines' in the title...though one could object to that too...)