[add-sub-mul-div]

The whole point is that it's a qualitatively different kind of failure, it's not quantitative. Wikipedia doesn't hallucinate. It can be wrong, sure, but it doesn't do what LLMs do when they go off the rails. So there should be a word that applies to LLM output but not a person or article that's simply wrong.

[solardev]

Why?

[add-sub-mul-div]

Why should there be different words for different concepts? I don't understand the question. We already use different terms for "lying" and "mistaken". We've invented a new way to be wrong and calling it something different conveys more nuance than just calling it "wrong".

[solardev]

I guess I don't understand the difference between a LLM "hallucinating" by probabilistically having chosen the wrong output given a certain input pattern, vs a human doing the same thing and just being "wrong". (But to be fair, this could just be my own lack of understanding about how LLMs and human brains work!)

I've certainly made that class of error myself, when I assumed that something followed a similar pattern (like in math, or writing & grammar, or coding) when it actually didn't.

I've also doubled-down on those errors when I tried to double-check my work, believing myself to have misapplied some intermediate step rather than having taken an entirely wrong approach to begin with.

I think the "why" here is "why are we assuming this failure mode is unique to LLMs and deserves novel terminology".

[add-sub-mul-div]

Neither of us understands how the human brain works, but both of us understand how synonyms work.

We could find out 800 years from now that human brains really do work exactly the same as LLMs do, but it wouldn't change the fact that today LLMs and humans in practice regularly manifest their respective mistakes in very different ways.

For example I don't have to worry about you making sense but then turning on a dime saying things like "Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay." or "Subtitles by the Amara.org community", which are both examples of OpenAI hallucinations I encountered today.

We can call that type of stupidity its own word, different from the types of mistakes you described making, just like we have many different words to convey the concept of "wet".

The fact that LLMs are probably not just baby people give an even greater justification to use different terminology for them.

Synonyms thrive in our languge with sometimes a hair's breadth of difference in nuance so it's silly to let optimism about tech deny this.

[solardev]

I think that's a fair take! Even if one day we could look back and say, "In the early 21st century, people thought AI would 'hallucinate' and didn't always trust them. Today we know better, and hallucinations were actually just ______..." well, it's still a useful concept in the meantime!