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by derefr 254 days ago
> So it's not really hallucinating - it correctly represents "seahorse emoji" internally, but that concept has no corresponding token.

I wonder if the human brain (and specifically the striated neocortical parts, which do seemingly work kind of like a feed-forward NN) also runs into this problem when attempting to process concepts to form speech.

Presumably, since we don't observe people saying "near but actually totally incorrect" words in practice, that means that we humans may have some kind of filter in our concept-to-mental-utterance transformation path that LLMs don't. Sometihng that can say "yes, layer N, I know you think the output should be O; but when auto-encoding X back to layer N-1, layer N-1 doesn't think O' has anything to do with what it was trying to say when it gave you the input I — so that output is vetoed. Try again."

A question for anyone here who is multilingual, speaking at least one second language with full grammatical fluency but with holes in your vocabulary vs your native language: when you go to say something in your non-native language, and one of the word-concepts you want to evoke is one you have a word for in your native language, but have never learned the word for in the non-native language... do you ever feel like there is a "maybe word" for the idea in your non-native language "on the tip of your tongue", but that you can't quite bring to conscious awareness?

1 comments

> Presumably, since we don't observe people saying "near but actually totally incorrect" words in practice

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphasia#Verbal_paraphasia

> do you ever feel like there is a "maybe word" for the idea in your non-native language "on the tip of your tongue", but that you can't quite bring to conscious awareness?

Sure, that happens all the time. Well, if you include the conscious awareness that you don't know every word in the language.

For Japanese you can cheat by either speaking like a child or by just saying English words with Japanese phonetics and this often works - at least, if you look foreign. I understand this is the plot of the average Dogen video on YouTube.

It's much more common to not know how to structure a sentence grammatically and if that happens I can't even figure out how to say it.

Huh, neat; I knew about aphasia (and specifically anomic aphasia) but had never heard of paraphasia.