@gotofritz @RnDanger @elfburgerman @AccordionBruce @grammargirl It's a marketing tactic.

And the problem with the metaphor of hallucination was explained at the top of the thread.

I'll be blocking you if you keep playing ignorant.

@RnDanger @elfburgerman @gotofritz @AccordionBruce @grammargirl Exactly. Making machines seem like magic, seem like they have no internal mechanism, is a common tactic. It's why we refer to external hard drives that we don't own or control as "the cloud."

@elfburgerman @gotofritz @RnDanger @AccordionBruce @grammargirl I think this is true. Like I said above, I have zero expectation that my language use is going to make a damn bit of difference at scale, but in individual conversations, refusing the metaphor of consciousness can help reframe.

It's just an error. The machine is faulty. It makes errors a lot.

@danielmunoz @grammargirl This is why I refer to its "error rate." It's a machine that produces false answers to such a large degree that it shouldn't be trusted. It's simply faulty.

@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.

@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 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 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%.