I've never been opposed to the word "hallucinating" for describing how AI makes mistakes ... until now.
I just talked to someone who thought AI hallucinations would be obvious because it would be obvious if you talked to a *person* who was hallucinating.
In other words, they equated "hallucination" with "sounds wacko" and accepted AI output as true because it sounded level headed.
1/2
The word "hallucination" isn't going away — it's a widely used industry term — but we need to explain it better for beginners:
"Hallucination" is just a fancy word for "confidently makes mistakes":
"Remember: AI hallucinates, and you need to confirm all facts" should be something like "Remember: AI confidently makes mistakes, and you need to confirm all facts" or "AI tells you things that are wrong in a way that sounds completely believable. Confirm all facts!"
the consistent trend of anthropomorphizing badly written programs, and the machines the programs run on, is used to make tech CEO's as a religious ruling class.
they create these facsimiles of truth and reality then prop themselves up as the sole interpreters and arbiters. like any religious hierarchy.
they're relying on humans ingrained need to assign importance to random objects and events and an interpreter to hand out judgement in return for taking all their money.
IMO "confabulation" is more accurate than "hallucination" because the former indicates a lack of intent. Given that LLMs are not sentient, they lack intention. At most, they are reflexively responding to a reward function that optimizes towards producing text roughly resembling the pattern of their training data, but that's different from intent.
Mignon Fogarty
James Gleick
AAA Trans Pirate
Dave Wilburn 