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cess11yesterday at 5:41 PM4 repliesview on HN

There is no difference between "hallucination" and "soberness", it's just a database you can't trust.

The response to your query might not be what you needed, similar to interacting with an RDBMS and mistyping a table name and getting data from another table or misremembering which tables exist and getting an error. We would not call such faults "hallucinations", and shouldn't when the database is a pile of eldritch vectors either. If we persist in doing so we'll teach other people to develop dangerous and absurd expectations.


Replies

thot_experimentyesterday at 5:52 PM

No it's absolutely not. One of these is a generative stochastic process that has no guarantee at all that it will produce correct data, and in fact you can make the OPPOSITE guarantee, you are guaranteed to sometimes get incorrect data. The other is a deterministic process of data access. I could perhaps only agree with you in the sense that such faults are not uniquely hallucinatory, all outputs from an LLM are.

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aydynyesterday at 5:46 PM

This seems unnecessarily pedantic. We know how the system works, we just use "hallucination" colloquially when the system produces wrong output.

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phantasmishyesterday at 6:01 PM

Yep. All these do is “hallucinate”. It’s hard to work those out of the system because that’s the entire thing it does. Sometimes the hallucinations just happen to be useful.

pdmccormickyesterday at 6:11 PM

"Eldritch vectors" is a perfect descriptor, thank you.