Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by crazygringo 1140 days ago
Has ChatGPT been caught hallucinating on summarization tasks?

My impression was that hallucination happened when it simply didn't have facts in the first place, had conflicting facts, etc.

I thought summarization was generally fairly reliable, but I'd be happy to know if this is not the case.

1 comments

Every summmarization is a choice of salience: what to include and what to leave ou, and how to express something in a different way.

The failure foolishly and misleadingly called “hallucination” is only one manifestation of an attribution error. If your summarizer leaves out something very important because it doesn’t understand it the result will be quite misleading.

For your average web text which these days is 90% filler and not important anyway, this is no big deal. This particular lawsuit appears the same. But for anything important, I wouldn’t trust it.