I've never been opposed to the word "hallucinating" for describing how AI makes mistakes ... until now.
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@feisty_lemming You can also specify the sources you want it to use with something like "These are the 20 sites I usually use. Check there first and add anything else that seems relevant."
But I'm sure there are lots of other use cases where it's more in the way than helpful.
I've done that and it generates ballpark-but-not-accurate information with fake citations.
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I've done that and it generates ballpark-but-not-accurate information with fake citations.
@eestileib Fake citations (and fake quotations) are a huge problem. And sometimes it’s not even that the citation is fully fake, but a real source has been transmogrified so the details are wrong—authors are in the wrong order, title is modified, etc. @grammargirl
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@orionkidder Good point.
Also, the error rate now highly depends on which model you're talking about, but I think that's the rate for those that are most widely used -- e.g., the free models.
@grammargirl I'm seeing people claim the error rate is lower with other models, and I'm not sure I believe that since this industries just piles lies on top of lies, but the only plausible explanation of the lowered error rate I've seen is for Claude code.
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@grammargirl I'm seeing people claim the error rate is lower with other models, and I'm not sure I believe that since this industries just piles lies on top of lies, but the only plausible explanation of the lowered error rate I've seen is for Claude code.
@grammargirl If I understand correctly, it shoves every query through the "AI" multiple times and tests whether it does the thing it's asked to do, but of course, it hides all of that from the user.
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@grammargirl If I understand correctly, it shoves every query through the "AI" multiple times and tests whether it does the thing it's asked to do, but of course, it hides all of that from the user.
@grammargirl To me, that feels like a brute-force workaround, a kludge, not an improvement in the tech itself. It's like saying, my car is too slow, so I'll attach a second engine to the hood.
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I've done that and it generates ballpark-but-not-accurate information with fake citations.
@eestileib @feisty_lemming I check everything and haven't had that problem. I find errors in maybe 1 in 50 links--like the page doesn't say what the model says it does--it's so rare that's just a total guess at the rate.
I'm not asking it to find new information -- just to check existing info. Not sure if that would be the difference. I also don't use the free models. They are dramatically worse.
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The word "hallucination" isn't going away — it's a widely used industry term — but we need to explain it better for beginners:
"Hallucination" is just a fancy word for "confidently makes mistakes":
"Remember: AI hallucinates, and you need to confirm all facts" should be something like "Remember: AI confidently makes mistakes, and you need to confirm all facts" or "AI tells you things that are wrong in a way that sounds completely believable. Confirm all facts!"
@grammargirl Would "delusional" be more apt?
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@grammargirl Would "delusional" be more apt?
@mpjgregoire I'm guessing no. Some people don't like any human condition applied to AI, and I imagine the person I talked to who thought they could recognize a hallucinating person/AI would also think they could recognize a delusional person/AI.
I take more words, but I think it's better to explain that it makes errors that don't sound like errors.
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@grammargirl like when medical people call someone "confused", AI "hallucination" is a more precise term than common parlance. it basically means the bot couldn't find a plausible answer and is for some reason blocked from saying "I don't know", so it makes stuff up.
that's a bit different from "confidently makes mistakes" becuase it's "confidently making stuff up entirely".
I have no idea what would be a good replacement for "hallucinate" in this context, I agree that it feels deceptive as is though.
I'm iffy on the term. But I don't have anything better.
But this: GenAI doesn't sometimes hallucinate. It always hallucinates. It only ever hallucinates.
Sometimes, what it hallucinates is plausible.
@draNgNon @grammargirl -
The word "hallucination" isn't going away — it's a widely used industry term — but we need to explain it better for beginners:
"Hallucination" is just a fancy word for "confidently makes mistakes":
"Remember: AI hallucinates, and you need to confirm all facts" should be something like "Remember: AI confidently makes mistakes, and you need to confirm all facts" or "AI tells you things that are wrong in a way that sounds completely believable. Confirm all facts!"
@grammargirl "AI tells you things that are wrong in a way that sounds completely believable."
Ah, so AI is like Wally Cox on Hollywood Squares! (Use this analogy on old people. We'll understand.)
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I've never been opposed to the word "hallucinating" for describing how AI makes mistakes ... until now.
I just talked to someone who thought AI hallucinations would be obvious because it would be obvious if you talked to a *person* who was hallucinating.
In other words, they equated "hallucination" with "sounds wacko" and accepted AI output as true because it sounded level headed.
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@grammargirl this is a good reason. I appose it for an additional reason: it's anthropomorphising, as does most language related to LLMs, including the term AI itself.
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I've never been opposed to the word "hallucinating" for describing how AI makes mistakes ... until now.
I just talked to someone who thought AI hallucinations would be obvious because it would be obvious if you talked to a *person* who was hallucinating.
In other words, they equated "hallucination" with "sounds wacko" and accepted AI output as true because it sounded level headed.
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@grammargirl You might get traction by describing it as "truthy" (and explaining that), or by noting that you'll get basically the same results by asking "What would a response to the question '(original question)' sound like?"
Note that "what it would sound like" is very much not the same as "what is the answer" - but what you get will sure *sound like* an answer.
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@grammargirl Hm. It’s not always obvious if a person you are talking to is hallucinating, depending on what their hallucinations are and what they say.
I get their point, just am sad on the mental illness rep side.
@grammargirl@zirk.us @queenofnewyork@newsie.social
I was thinking this too, if someone thinks they can tell if a person is hallucinating because it's "obvious", then they have a major misunderstanding of how hallucinations work at all.
I get where the concern is for AI hallucinations as a term, but then the same concern is there for hallucinations a human person has too.
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I've never been opposed to the word "hallucinating" for describing how AI makes mistakes ... until now.
I just talked to someone who thought AI hallucinations would be obvious because it would be obvious if you talked to a *person* who was hallucinating.
In other words, they equated "hallucination" with "sounds wacko" and accepted AI output as true because it sounded level headed.
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all the outputs of LLMs and the like are hallucinations, it's just that the "bell curve" of the outputs overlap the appearance of most of what the user wants
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I've never been opposed to the word "hallucinating" for describing how AI makes mistakes ... until now.
I just talked to someone who thought AI hallucinations would be obvious because it would be obvious if you talked to a *person* who was hallucinating.
In other words, they equated "hallucination" with "sounds wacko" and accepted AI output as true because it sounded level headed.
1/2
They are AI mirages: they look like what you asked for but the closer you look the less there is.
Only users can hallucinate.
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I've never been opposed to the word "hallucinating" for describing how AI makes mistakes ... until now.
I just talked to someone who thought AI hallucinations would be obvious because it would be obvious if you talked to a *person* who was hallucinating.
In other words, they equated "hallucination" with "sounds wacko" and accepted AI output as true because it sounded level headed.
1/2
@grammargirl i had a discussion with someone who thought the screen would go fuzzy or similar when AI was hallucinating. So they thought it would be obvious
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I'm iffy on the term. But I don't have anything better.
But this: GenAI doesn't sometimes hallucinate. It always hallucinates. It only ever hallucinates.
Sometimes, what it hallucinates is plausible.
@draNgNon @grammargirl@BenAveling @draNgNon @grammargirl
The AI is generating language from some matrix algebra that regurgitates transforms of the test data or mirages of it. Only users can hallucinate and believe the mirages are real while a whirring vortex of vectors can't believe in anything.
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The word "hallucination" isn't going away — it's a widely used industry term — but we need to explain it better for beginners:
"Hallucination" is just a fancy word for "confidently makes mistakes":
"Remember: AI hallucinates, and you need to confirm all facts" should be something like "Remember: AI confidently makes mistakes, and you need to confirm all facts" or "AI tells you things that are wrong in a way that sounds completely believable. Confirm all facts!"
@grammargirl I think it's funny that people who object to the use of 'halluctinate' because it anthropomorphises AI are nonetheless happy with their use of the word 'confident', as in 'confidently makes mistakes', in the same context.
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@grammargirl This is a good example of why that term is so dangerous. Thank you for posting it.
That said, while I have zero hope of making that term go away, we also have the word "slop" as a counter.
"Ugh. It had a hallucination..."
"Yup. And the results are now slop."
That said, I don't myself use "hallucination" in the "AI" context. I refer to the error rate, which last I checked, hovered around 40%.
@orionkidder @grammargirl I’ve heard the Spanish science communicator Ignacio Crespo argue that “hallucination” is misleading in this context, because it imports a human mental-state metaphor into a statistical text-generation error. “Confabulation” may be closer: a plausible-sounding reconstruction that fills gaps. Still, it also comes from human cognition, so it can anthropomorphise the model too.
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@orionkidder @grammargirl I’ve heard the Spanish science communicator Ignacio Crespo argue that “hallucination” is misleading in this context, because it imports a human mental-state metaphor into a statistical text-generation error. “Confabulation” may be closer: a plausible-sounding reconstruction that fills gaps. Still, it also comes from human cognition, so it can anthropomorphise the model too.
@orionkidder @grammargirl I think the deeper problem with “hallucination” is that it imports a human mental-state metaphor into a statistical text-generation error. That can make people expect obviously bizarre output, when the real danger is often confident, plausible-sounding falsehoods. “Confabulation” has a similar problem, though. But, I don’t know, it sounds better to me.
