This is to fight back against the term "hallucinate" that everyone on here is using
I just asked (another anthropomorphic verb) ChatGPT for a better word and it came up with "fabricate".
> The term "fabricate" could be used to describe AI's tendency to generate fictitious information. This term has less anthropomorphic connotations than "hallucinate" and directly refers to the creation or construction of something, which could be a suitable representation for what an AI system does when it generates false data. Other alternatives could be "synthesize" or "generate," depending on the specific context.
> Confabulation is distinguished from lying as there is no intent to deceive and the person is unaware the information is false. Although individuals can present blatantly false information, confabulation can also seem to be coherent, internally consistent, and relatively normal.
> Can include autobiographical and non-personal information, such as historical facts, fairy-tales, or other aspects of semantic memory.
> The account can be fantastic or coherent.
> Both the premise and the details of the account can be false.
> The account is usually drawn from the patient's memory of actual experiences, including past and current thoughts.
> The patient is unaware of the accounts' distortions or inappropriateness, and is not concerned when errors are pointed out.
> There is no hidden motivation behind the account.
I think the best way to refer to these things is the more accurate "error". The LLM isn't lying, it's in error.
There's one side of the current zeitgeist that over-anthropomorphizes these models. But there's another side that seems to be terrified that LLMs could be anything resembling intelligent
Both sides are pretty emotion over facts though. A lot of their "human-like" behavior is emergent from things that don't work the same way in a humans... but we also don't understand cognition enough to then say there's no overlap between what LLMs are doing and what some part of our own thought process is like. If anything we have more studies that imply the opposite going back decades: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09266...
Correct. Which, as near as I can tell, isn't the correct characterization of what's happening with LLMs.
> But there's another side that seems to be terrified that LLMs could be anything resembling intelligent
I certainly have no such fear. I say that only to indicate that my biases are not of that sort.
Is it an unfounded or mistaken cluster of tokens which resemble an impression or notion then?
At the end of the day it's producing an output which systemically was intended to be accurate, but ended up not being accurate through a mistake in generation: That's a hallucination.
It is completely reasonable to say that "This machine fabricates widgets." or "This algorithm fabricates pseudo-random song lyrics." without being worried that the machine or the algorithm is exercising "cognition".