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by bionhoward 709 days ago
Check out these Wikipedia articles:

Confabulation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation

Hallucination https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination

What drove the AI industry to blow off accepted naming from psychopathology and use the word for PERCEPTUAL errors to refer to LANGUAGE OUTPUT errors?

When AI hallucinates, and AI people already use the preferred term “hallucination” to label confabulations, then what’s the new word for “hallucinations?”

How will we avoid serious errors in understanding if hallucination in AI means confabulation in humans and $NEW_TERM in AI means hallucination in humans?

Just seems harmful to gloss over this humongous vocabulary error.

How can we claim to respect the difficulty of naming things if we all select the wrong answer to a basic undergrad psychology multiple choice question with only two options?

It feels like painting ourselves into a corner which will inevitably make computer scientists look dumb. Who here wants to look dumb for no reason?

I don’t want to be negative, but is using the blatantly wrong word for confabulation a good idea in the long term?

1 comments

if i may theorize: one of these two terms is generally recognised by the broader english speaking community