[romanhn]

While AI hallucination problems are widely known to the technical crowd, that's not really the case with the general population. Perhaps that applies to the majority of the user base even. I've certainly known folks who place inordinate amount of trust in AI output, and I could see them misplacing the blame when a "promised" feature doesn't work right.

[carlosjobim]

The thing is that it doesn't matter. If they're not customers it doesn't matter at all what they think. People get false ideas all the time of what kind of services a business might or might not offer.

[dontlikeyoueith]

> If they're not customers it doesn't matter at all what they think

That kind of thinking is how you never get new customers and eventually fail as a business.

[carlosjobim]

It is the kind of thinking that almost all businesses have. You have to focus on the actual products and services which you provide and do a good job at it, not chase after any and every person with an opinion.

Down voters here on HN seem to live in a egocentric fantasy world, where every human being in the outside world live to serve them. But the reality is that business owners and leaders spend their whole day thinking about how to please their customers and their potential customers. Not other random people who might be misinformed.

[graeme]

If people repeatedly have a misunderstanding about or expectation of your business you need to address it though. An llm hallucination is based on widespread norms in training data and it is at least worth asking "would this be a good idea?"

[carlosjobim]

An LLM will say that you sell your competitors products or that your farm sells freshly harvested strawberries in the middle of winter. There are no limits to what kind of lies an LLM will invent, and a business owner would be a fool to feel responsible for anything an LLM has told people about their business or products.

The best LLMs available right in this moment will lie without remorse about bus schedules and airplane departure times. How in the world are businesses supposed to take responsibility for that?

Likewise if I have a neighbour who is a notorious liar tell me I can find a piece of equipment in a certain hardware store, should I be mad at the store owner when I don't find it there, or should I maybe be mad at my neighbour – the notorious liar?

[graeme]

>Likewise if I have a neighbour who is a notorious liar tell me I can find a piece of equipment in a certain hardware store, should I be mad at the store owner when I don't find it there, or should I maybe be mad at my neighbour – the notorious liar?

If you are a store own, AND

1. People repeatedly coming in to your shop asking to buy something, AND

2. It is similar to the kinds of things you sell, from the suppliers you usually get supplies from, AND

3. You don't sell it

Then it sounds like your neighbour the notorious liar is doing profitable marketing for your business and sending you leads which you could profitably sell to, if you sold the item.

If there's a single customer who arrives via hallucination, ignore it. If there's a stream of them, why would you not serve them if you can profit by doing so?

There are obviously instances you'd ignore and you seem to be focussing on those rather than what OP was obviously talking about, repeat instances of sensible ideas

[smaudet]

I think the issue here would be that we don't really know just how widespread, nor the impact of the issue.

Ok, sure, maybe this feature was worth having?

But if some people start sending bad requests your way because they can't or only program poorly, it doesn't make sense to potentially degrade the service for your successful paying customers...

[epidemian]

> You have to focus on the actual products and services which you provide and do a good job at it, not chase after any and every person with an opinion.

But, this story (and the GP comment) is not talking about "any person with an opinion". It's talking about actual ChatGPT users. People who've used ChatGPT as a service, and got false information from it. Even if they were free-tier users (do we even know that?), i think it makes sense for them to have some expectations about the service working somewhat correctly.

And in the concrete case of these LLM chat services, many people do get the impression that the responses they give must be correct, because of how deceptively sure and authoritative they sound, even when inventing pure BS.

[dontlikeyoueith]

> You have to focus on the actual products and services which you provide and do a good job at it, not chase after any and every person with an opinion.

That's a nice straw man you have there.