I still think confabulation is a better term for what LLMs do than hallucination.
Hallucination - A hallucination is a false perception where a person senses something that isn't actually there, affecting any of the five senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, or taste. These experiences can seem very real to the person experiencing them, even though they are not based on external stimuli.
Confabulation - Confabulation is a memory error consisting of the production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world. It is generally associated with certain types of brain damage or a specific subset of dementias.
bluefirebrand•3h ago
You're not wrong in a strict sense, but you have to remember that most people aren't that strict about language
I would bet that for most people they define the words like:
Hallucination - something that isn't real
Confabulation - a word that they have never heard of
static_void•2h ago
We should not bend over backwards to use language the way ignorant people do.
add-sub-mul-div•2h ago
"Bending over backwards" is a pretty ignorant metaphor for this situation, it describes explicit activity whereas letting people use metaphor loosely only requires passivity.
furyofantares•2h ago
I like communicating with people using a shared understanding of the words being used, even if I have an additional, different understanding of the words, which I can use with other people.
That's what words are, anyway.
dingnuts•1h ago
I like calling it bullshit[0] because it's the most accurate, most understandable, and the most fun to use with a footnote
We should not bend over backwards to use language the way anally retentive people demand we do.
rad_gruchalski•16m ago
Ignorance clusters easily. You’ll have no problem finding alike.
vkou•14m ago
> Ignorance clusters easily.
So does pedantry and prickliness.
Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad. It's fine to want to do your part to steer language, but this is not one of those cases where it's important enough for anyone to be an asshole about it.
rad_gruchalski•11m ago
It also becomes apparent that ignorance leads to a weird aggressive asshole fetish.
resonious•8m ago
I would go one step further and suppose that a lot of people just don't know what confabulation means.
maxbond•2h ago
I think "apophenia" (attributing meaning to spurious connections) or "pareidolia" (the form of aphonenia where we see faces where there are none) would have been good choices, as well.
cratermoon•2h ago
anthropoglossic systems.
Terr_•2h ago
Largely Logorrhea Models.
rollcat•2h ago
There's a simpler word for that: lying.
It's also equally wrong. Lying implies intent. Stop anthropomorphising language models.
sorcerer-mar•1h ago
Lying is different from confabulation. As you say, lying implies intent. Confabulation does not necessarily, ergo it's a far better word than either lying or hallucinating.
A person with dementia confabulates a lot, which entails describing reality "incorrectly";, but it's not quite fair to describe it as lying.
bandrami•31m ago
A liar seeks to hide the truth; a confabulator is indifferent to the truth entirely. It's an important distinction. True statements can still be confabulations.
matkoniecz•2h ago
And why confabulation is better one of those?
bee_rider•2h ago
It seems like these are all anthropomorphic euphemisms for things that would otherwise be described as bugs, errors (in the “broken program” sense), or error (in the “accumulation of numerical error” sense), if LLMs didn’t have the easy-to-anthropomorphize chat interface.
diggan•1h ago
Imagine you have function that is called "is_true" but it only gets it right 60% of the time. We're doing this within CS/ML, so lets call that "correctness" or something fancier. In order for that function to be valuable, would we need to hit a 100% in correctness? I mean probably most of the time, yeah. But sometimes, maybe even rarely, we're fine with it being less than 100%, but still as high as possible.
So in this point of view, it's not a bug or error that it currently sits at 60%, but if we manage to find a way to hit 70%, it would be better. But in order to figure this out, we need to call this "correct for most part, but could be better" concept something. So we look at what we already know and are familiar with, and try to draw parallels, maybe even borrow some names/words.
bee_rider•1h ago
This doesn’t seem too different from my third thing, error (in the “accumulation of numerical error” sense).
timewizard•1h ago
> but if we manage to find a way to hit 70%, it would be better.
Yet still absolutely worthless.
> "correct for most part, but could be better" concept something.
When humans do that we just call it "an error."
> so lets call that "correctness" or something
The appropriate term is "confidence." These LLM tools all could give you a confidence rating with each and every "fact" it attempts to relay to you. Of course they don't actually do that because no one would use a tool that confidently gives you answers based on a 70% self confidence rating.
We can quibble over terms but more appropriately this is just "garbage." It's a giant waste of energy and resources that produces flawed results. All of that money and effort could be better used elsewhere.
vrighter•1h ago
and even those confidence ratings are useless, imo. If trained with wrong data, it will report high confidence for the wrong answer. And curating a dataset is a black art in the first place
georgemcbay•44m ago
They aren't really bugs though in the traditional sense because all LLMs ever do is "hallucinate", seeing what we call a hallucination as something fundamentally different than what we consider a correct response is further anthropomorphising the LLM.
We just label it with that word when it statistically generates something we know to be wrong, but functionally what it did in that case is no different than when it statistically generated something that we know to be correct.
anshumankmr•3h ago
Can we submit ChatGPT convo histories??
Flemlo•3h ago
So what's the amount of cases were it was wrong but no one checked?
add-sub-mul-div•2h ago
Good point. People putting the least amount of effort into their job that they can get away with is universal, judges are no more immune to it than lawyers.
mullingitover•37m ago
This seems like a perfect use case for a legal MCP server that can provide grounding for citations. Protomated already has one[1].
irrational•3h ago
Hallucination - A hallucination is a false perception where a person senses something that isn't actually there, affecting any of the five senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, or taste. These experiences can seem very real to the person experiencing them, even though they are not based on external stimuli.
Confabulation - Confabulation is a memory error consisting of the production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world. It is generally associated with certain types of brain damage or a specific subset of dementias.
bluefirebrand•3h ago
I would bet that for most people they define the words like:
Hallucination - something that isn't real
Confabulation - a word that they have never heard of
static_void•2h ago
add-sub-mul-div•2h ago
furyofantares•2h ago
That's what words are, anyway.
dingnuts•1h ago
0 (featured previously on HN) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
rad_gruchalski•15m ago
AllegedAlec•32m ago
rad_gruchalski•16m ago
vkou•14m ago
So does pedantry and prickliness.
Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad. It's fine to want to do your part to steer language, but this is not one of those cases where it's important enough for anyone to be an asshole about it.
rad_gruchalski•11m ago
resonious•8m ago
maxbond•2h ago
cratermoon•2h ago
Terr_•2h ago
rollcat•2h ago
It's also equally wrong. Lying implies intent. Stop anthropomorphising language models.
sorcerer-mar•1h ago
A person with dementia confabulates a lot, which entails describing reality "incorrectly";, but it's not quite fair to describe it as lying.
bandrami•31m ago
matkoniecz•2h ago
bee_rider•2h ago
diggan•1h ago
So in this point of view, it's not a bug or error that it currently sits at 60%, but if we manage to find a way to hit 70%, it would be better. But in order to figure this out, we need to call this "correct for most part, but could be better" concept something. So we look at what we already know and are familiar with, and try to draw parallels, maybe even borrow some names/words.
bee_rider•1h ago
timewizard•1h ago
Yet still absolutely worthless.
> "correct for most part, but could be better" concept something.
When humans do that we just call it "an error."
> so lets call that "correctness" or something
The appropriate term is "confidence." These LLM tools all could give you a confidence rating with each and every "fact" it attempts to relay to you. Of course they don't actually do that because no one would use a tool that confidently gives you answers based on a 70% self confidence rating.
We can quibble over terms but more appropriately this is just "garbage." It's a giant waste of energy and resources that produces flawed results. All of that money and effort could be better used elsewhere.
vrighter•1h ago
georgemcbay•44m ago
We just label it with that word when it statistically generates something we know to be wrong, but functionally what it did in that case is no different than when it statistically generated something that we know to be correct.