[ryandvm]

Unproductive tangent: Why do we call it "hallucinationing" instead of "bullshitting" when that is so clearly what it is?

If I'm talking to a guy that says, "I have a really fast metabolism, that's why I can eat whatever I want", he's not hallucinating - he's full of shit.

[readthenotes1]

Avoiding crass language may be one reason.

Just think, one of the hullabaloos of today is because our ancestors were two Victorian to put "sex" on the birth certificate

[cyanydeez]

bullshitting is an intent; hallucination is a misrepresentation of something.

I agree that the way models are trained, their basic presentation is bullshitting, but models dont have intent. Nor, do I think, they can be trained to have intent. They have a k value that generates non-determinism for them, that leads to the bullshitting.

But the intent part is what I don't think bullshitting properly describes. LLMs don't have intent.

I do think you could refer to their affect as narcissism. Every time I see them bullshit something, it's often because it thinks there's no way what _its doing_ is wrong; like when it tries to run pgsql using default settings (despite being told the credentials), it reports it can't connect because the database isn't running, then it goes and tries to run it. Sometimes it gets back correctly, sometimes not.

But it's not bullshitting because there's no intent it's essentially just the type of narcissism that everything else is wrong.