Hard disagree. I’m browsing the internet not surfing the Information Super Highway. Mainstream media needs to rely less on allegory once technology becomes mainstream.
LLMs aren't mainstream yet. When they are, it will simply be common cultural knowledge that they can (lie,hallucinate,confabulate,whatever) and metaphors won't be necessary, the way the internet became mainstream once it was common knowledge not to "feed trolls" or "click on spam."
At the moment, most people still think LLMs are basically like the computers from Star Trek, rational, sentient and always correct. Like those lawyers who used ChatGPT to generate legal arguments - it didn't even occur to them that AI could fabricate data, they assumed it was just a search engine you could talk to like a person.
This is why we still need metaphors to spread cultural knowledge. To that end I think it's less important to be technically accurate than to impart an idea clearly. "Hallucinate" and "confabulate" get the same point across, but the former is more widely understood.
Even "confabulate" isn't great, since it carries the connotation of either deception or senility/mental illness. But the "confabulation" of LLMs is inherent to their design. They aren't intended to discern truth, or accuracy, but statistical similarity to a stream of language tokens.
And humans don't really do that, so we don't really have language fit to describe how LLMs operate without resorting to anthropomorphism and metaphors from human behavior.
At the moment, most people still think LLMs are basically like the computers from Star Trek, rational, sentient and always correct. Like those lawyers who used ChatGPT to generate legal arguments - it didn't even occur to them that AI could fabricate data, they assumed it was just a search engine you could talk to like a person.
This is why we still need metaphors to spread cultural knowledge. To that end I think it's less important to be technically accurate than to impart an idea clearly. "Hallucinate" and "confabulate" get the same point across, but the former is more widely understood.
Even "confabulate" isn't great, since it carries the connotation of either deception or senility/mental illness. But the "confabulation" of LLMs is inherent to their design. They aren't intended to discern truth, or accuracy, but statistical similarity to a stream of language tokens.
And humans don't really do that, so we don't really have language fit to describe how LLMs operate without resorting to anthropomorphism and metaphors from human behavior.