[maister]

> Humans "hallucinate" in the AI sense (it's an awful word that obscures how often we do it) all the time too.

Agreed. I'd like to add another point to the discussion. It seems to me, as if LLMs are held to a higher standard regarding telling the truth than humans are. In my opinion the reason for this is that computers have been traditionally used to solve deterministic tasks and that people are not used to them making wrong claims.

[vidarh]

LLMs are also probed a lot more for the limits of their knowledge. Consider the thousands of hours of peoples time that have gone into poking at the limits of the understanding of ChatGPT alone.

Imagine subjecting a random human to the same battery of conversations and judging the truthfulness of their answers.

Now, imagine doing the same to a child too young to have had many years of reinforcement of the social consequences of not clearly distinguishing fantasy from perceived truth.

I do think a human adult would (still) be likely to be overall better at distinguishing truth from fiction when replying, but I'm not at all confident that a human child would.

I think LLMs will need more reinforcement from probing the limits of their knowledge to make it easier to rely on their responses, but I also think one of the reasons people hold LLMs to the standard they do is also that they "sound" knowledgeable. If ChatGPT spoke like a 7 year old, nobody would take issue with it making a lot of stuff up. But since ChatGPT is more eloquent than most adults, it's easy to expect it to behave like a human adult. LLMs have gaps that are confusing to us because the signs we tend to go by to judge someones intelligence are not reliable with LLMs.

[Workaccount2]

> It seems to me, as if LLMs are held to a higher standard regarding telling the truth than humans are.

Paradoxically, it seems as if the people who are pushing this the hardest are the same people who flat out deny even the slightest flicker of what could be considered intelligence.