alt Hacker NewsI disagree, I think 'Hallucination' is a risk-shedding weasel-word. It's meant to shift blame away from the technology and its creator (multibillion dollar AI companies etc) in a way that doesn't hold those actors accountable or responsible for the outcomes.
In any other software it would be an error, regression, bug. And in a human process it would be at ~least something someone would call 'bullshit'.
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I’m not sure either would is particularly good at describing what is happening.
Error in implies something broke, which nothing broke the LLM did exactly what they where designed to do generate text based on a statistically likely bases.
Hallucination Does really fit here either. It implies it’s experiencing something that is not there which it isn’t experiencing anything.
> In any other software it would be an error, regression, bug.
How is "bug", literally an organism with a will of its own that you cannot control, any less of a weasel word?
Totally weasel words in this time frame. I think in 10 years after everyone has a better understanding of what we are dealing with these weasel words would maybe make sense. Right now it seems more sensible to deem this at best a false positive, or glitch, or if it must be anthropomorphized a screw up or a f' up. I don't think the llms are dehydrated. Although that's funny on another level. Edited: to be less abrasive
error, regression, bug, bullshit are not weasel words, hallucination is a weasel word because why exactly? your argument is a weasel argument.
Using the term "Hallucination" makes it sound less problematic, less impactfull for user.
They should have used the term "error". For example in statistics, there many kinds of errors, discretization error, prediction error, sampling error, ...
https://www.statisticshowto.com/errors-in-statistics/