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by mrdevlar 809 days ago
An LLM gets things wrong. It's no different than interacting with a person. You will get a confident answer. The difference is you can easily get a second opinion of an LLM without offending it. Hallucinations are unlikely to occur twice in a row. So just ask twice.
2 comments

>Hallucinations are unlikely to occur twice in a row. So just ask twice.

lol

If it's not already easily googleable, the LLM will just spit out some boilerplate apology and then double down on the previous wrong answers, provide something correct about a tangentially related topic, or just reword my prompt as a course of investigation that - if written by a person - would just be a polite "fuck off and go figure it out yourself."

I get that sometimes, but not all the time.

ChatGPT seems to be able to fix, I'm going to say "about half" of it's own mistakes, but that's my gut feeling and not a detailed analysis even within the domain of questions I've been asking (which itself probably isn't representative).

That's not true. For every non-trivial[1] question I've asked chatgpt hallucinated and then kept hallucinating no matter how many times I've asked, clarified, or gave it hints.

[1] i.e. specific to my niche where i didn't know the answer immediately.