[2devnull]

The first thing to learn is you can’t trust the internet. From that you’ll know not to trust gpt. If you are prone to trusting things blindly, without doing your own research or verification, you have far bigger problems than gpt “hallucinations” (frankly a terrible terminology).

[digging]

I find "hallucinations" to be pretty apt. What works better in your opinion?

[starfallg]

The neurological term for it is "Confabulation", which is a lot better than "Hallucination" as used in AI.

Confabulation is the unintended generation of false memories.

Hallucination is false perception.

Clearly, the phenomenon we are seeing with LLM researchers call Hallucination better fits Confabulation.

[szundi]

Sometimes it helps when the audience gets the meaning of a word. Confabulation is not really popular among non-native english speakers, I am sure.

[qup]

It's also not popular among native English speakers, I can assure you.

[digging]

I don't actually think either term is more precise than the other when we're talking about LLMs, which aren't human brains. It doesn't have either memory or perception in a way that we do.

[moomoo3000]

I think the horse had left the barn on this one.

[nborwankar]

“Confidently presented bullshit” is probably much more accurate. Added benefit no new vocabulary terms :-)

[jstarfish]

Lies. Bullshit. Con artistry.

It's not perceiving reality incorrectly, it's presenting wholesale fiction as fact both coherently and with absolute confidence. It even forges supporting documentation ad-hoc.

GPT is not a poor schizophrenic suffering from delusions or innocuous "hallucinations." It is the world's most advanced liar.

[windsignaling]

> Lies. Bullshit. Con artistry.

These are worse as they imply the thing generating the words knows the truth and purposely says something else.

An LLM is just doing next token prediction. It's a mathematical process. It's not trying to "hide" the truth from you.

[wingspar]

For me, hallucination is better.

Lies, BS, and Con artistry all require conscious motive and intent. Thats a bridge to far, for me, in ascribing ‘intelligence’ to these models.

Hallucination, to me, conveys ‘seeing things (facts) that are not there’. To the extent the models are ‘perceiving’, they ARE perceiving reality incorrectly. Granted, I expect many times it’s because the source of the model training data are, at best, just wrong or are lying.

[digging]

Those are very inaccurate descriptors. A lie is an intentional deception, which is impossible for GPT. It "believes" that it "knows" something about the world, which happens to have been made up wholesale by its "subconscious" (obviously I know it's not a human brain). That is pretty much a hallucination by definition, applied to a non-human "intelligence".

Besides,

> it's presenting wholesale fiction as fact both coherently and with absolute confidence

That is not in any way distinct from perceiving reality incorrectly. It is a symptom common to both skilled lying and hallucination.