[deltaninenine]

That's just your opinion. I say we need to prove this out.

If a significant portion of the tech and non techy population anthropomorphized LLMs to the point where they don't understand that LLMs hallucinate then surely some of those people exist on HN.

If one of you readers is one such person who honestly has no idea what it means for chatGPT to "hallucinate" then let us know (and be honest, please don't troll).

My bet is no one will respond with affirmation because the amount of people who don't get it is miniscule.

[gregjor]

You're arguing that something observed so often and consistently that it has had a name for decades -- the ELIZA Effect [1] -- doesn't actually happen often enough to care about.

I have referred to ChatGPT hallucinations with multiple friends and family, some in tech and some not (like my parents and my kids), and with one exception none of them knew what I was talking about. Like most people they think computers can't make mistakes, so it follows logically (for them) that an (apparently) intelligent machine can't make mistakes, i.e. hallucinate. I have a couple of my own ChatGPT transcripts that include hallucinations and when I show those to people they say that I deliberately misled the AI, because how could it make a mistake?

In my own experience, which includes people who work in the software field and people who don't, including a couple of friends who work with neural networks and LLMs, almost no one understands how LLMs work, or what limitations they might have, or what "hallucinate" means in the context of ChatGPT. Almost everyone I know is much more likely to believe AIs have already or will soon put them out of a job and start turning us into slaves or launching nuclear strikes, because that's the nonsense they get fed my the media.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

[deltaninenine]

>doesn't actually happen often enough to care about.

That's my entire point. It doesn't happen often enough to care about.

Sounds like you have some anecdotal experience of it happening to your entire family and a lot of your friends.

I experience the opposite. It has happened to exactly none of my friends and family.

We do live in contradictory universes where you experience one thing and I experience another thing. Given the contradiction let's refer to the shared experience: nobody on this entire HN thread has experienced the Eliza effect. The shared experience proves my pov.

>Almost everyone I know is much more likely to believe AIs have already or will soon put them out of a job

This first part of your sentence has a higher likelihood of being true. The reason is because there are instances of it are already happening. It's limited given the limitations of LLMs but we are at a point where if the hallucinations are fixed then it can very much replace many jobs.

Nuclear strikes and slavery is a bit far fetched.

[gregjor]

I think you misread my first sentence.

[deltaninenine]

No. You just mis expressed your point with a logical mistake.

You wanted to explain why I can't find evidence for the Eliza effect on HN, but you didn't realize that it contradicts your overall point of the effect.

I exploited the flaw to point out the contradiction in your thinking. Your ideas are not logically coherent your following a sort of bias here where you're trying to construct ideas to support your bias.