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fn-moteyesterday at 5:10 PM7 repliesview on HN

The title is misleading. This isn't the correct use of the term "hallucination". Hallucination refers to making up facts, not extrapolating into the future.

I read 10 comments before I realized that this was referring to 10 years in the FUTURE and not in the PAST (as would be required for it to be a hallucination).


Replies

oriettaxxyesterday at 10:21 PM

> I read 10 comments before I realized that this was referring to 10 years in the FUTURE and not in the PAST (as would be required for it to be a hallucination).

omg, the same for me, I was half way telling my colleague about the 100% rest kernel ...

alexwebb2yesterday at 9:40 PM

You're correct, OP used the word "hallucination" wrong. A lot of these other comments are missing the point – some deliberately ('don't they ONLY hallucinate, har har'), some not.

For those who genuinely don't know – hallucination specifically means false positive identification of a fact or inference (accurate or not!) that isn't supported by the LLM's inputs.

- ask for capital of France, get "London" => hallucination

- ask for current weather in London, get "It's cold and rainy!" and that happens to be correct, despite not having live weather data => hallucination

- ask for capital of DoesNotExistLand, get "DoesNotExistCity" => hallucination

- ask it to give its best GUESS for the current weather in London, it guess "cold and rainy" => not a hallucination

madeofpalkyesterday at 5:19 PM

It’s apt, because the only thing LLMs is hallucinate because they have no grounding in reality. They take your input and hallucinate to do something “useful” with it.

adastra22yesterday at 5:12 PM

There is no technical difference.

rrr_oh_manyesterday at 5:12 PM

Don’t LLMs only ever hallucinate?

hombre_fatalyesterday at 5:13 PM

Extrapolation is a subset of hallucination.

The ubiquitous use of hallucination I see is merely "something the LLM made up".

jrm4yesterday at 5:20 PM

You're right this is how people are PRESENTLY using the term "hallucination," but to me this illustrates the deeper truth about that term and that concept:

As many have said but it still bears repeating -- they're always hallucinating. I'm of the opinion that its a huge mistake to use "hallucination" as meaning "the opposite of getting it right." It's just not that. They're doing the same thing either way.