[azinman2]

It does matter, because the flat earther isn't to likely make something up about everything they talk about. They can communicate their world view, and you quickly start to figure out a model of theirs as you talk to them. None of that is true with an LLM. Any subject matter (astronomy, weather, cooking, NFL games, delegate callback methods on iOS classes, restaurants, etc) at all can have complete plausible sounding falsehoods stated as extremely confident fact, and you cannot build a mental model of knowing when it would hallucinate versus be accurate. 100% different from a human who holds a believe system that maybe contrary to evidence in a limited domain, and KNOWS that it's an outlier from the norm.

[SanderNL]

Fair enough. Your point is valid and I hate to be that person, but..

> It does matter, because the flat earther isn't to likely make something up about everything they talk about.

I am less optimistic about this. It seems to me you are vastly overestimating the average person's rationality. Rational types are overwhelming minority. It always amazes me how even my own thin layer of rationality breaks down so very fast. I used to think we live on top of vast mountains of rationality, but now I feel more like we, deep down, are vast ancient Lovecraftian monsters with a thin layer of human veneer.

I'm not arguing that LLMs today are comparable to how humans can maintain a perspective and contain their own "hallucinations", but I am arguing that it is a matter of quantity, not quality. It's a matter of time (IMO).

[azinman2]

If you ask a flat earther where they recommend eating, they’re not going to interweave restaurants that exist with restaurants that don’t, but have plausible sounding restaurant names. Or if you ask for the web address of those restaurants, the flat earther will say “I don’t know, google it.” They won’t just make up plausible sounding URLs that don’t actually exist.

Hallucinations for LLMs are at a different level and approach every subject matter. Because it’s all just “predict the next word,” not “predict the next word but only if it makes sense to do so, and if it doesn’t, say you’re not sure.”

[SanderNL]

I understand, it’s a failure mode unique to LLM’s. What I mean is that it has no relation with intelligence. Humans have failure modes too and often quite weird an surprising ones too, but they are different. It’s just that we biased and used to it.