Comment by galaxyLogic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by galaxyLogic | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I had the same thought that "hallucinate" is too strong a term for what LLMs are doing.

Instead I would say they DREAM. Dreams follow some logic but basically they are disjoint from reality. They involve same characters as our real-life experiences but what those characters do in a dream is not based on reality.

So one could think that ALL LLMs ever do is dream but much of the time their dreams are dreams which feel very real.

Our dreams are basically an LLM based on our real experiences but recombined in arbitrary ways, still retaining some logical structure but now detached from reality because when you recombine different experiences including our thoughts from real life, the result cannot really reflect reality very well. LLMs are better in this respect than our dreams, but sometimes their "dreams" get really obviously detached from reality.

Or if you want to use the term "hallucinate" with LLMs then fine but its more like they hallucinate all the time, it's just that sometimes, even often, their hallucinations seem to agree with the reality so well that we cannot tell the difference.

LLMs do not describe reality because they cannot experience reality, all they can give us is an "average description" created from many existing descriptions.

One way of looking at it is to say that all LLMs tell us is hearsay.

Dreams involve the concept of self, consciousness and an understanding of reality. all of it is far too anthropomorphic.

Hallucinations are much better described as noise. Its noise that lowers the quality of the signal. its just unlike white noise, this is in the form of coherent sentences/imagery.

The term the article uses is more accurate. A hallucination can be entirely disjoint from the context it appears in. Confabulation is a confident belief in an erroneous recall that one will attempt to defend and rationalize. That's exactly what's happening with an LLM. They choose the wrong token or series of tokens, essentially failing to remember correctly, and then present it confidently and make rationalizations about why it's correct.

> make rationalizations about why it's correct.

Its not rationalising, its statistically choosing the next token. Also, generally the LLM doesn't get defensive (although its not always the case.)

Its not like a dementia patient not finding their keys and gradually convincing themselves that someone stole them instead. Because the alternative, that they are loosing cognitive faculties, is too horrific to acknowledge.

This is why its so annoyingly problematic. too much humanising, and not enough witnessing someone with dementia "confabulating"

It is noise, and nothing else.

Maybe, but tell me this, how do you rationalize or reason without using words or symbols of any kind?

by using logical fallacies.

This comment isn't saying anything. It says "LLMs statistically choose the next token" and, because of that, it can't be anything else.

We know how the LLMs were trained, so re-stating it doesn't help in anything. The point is that after the LLMs are trained they behave in certain ways and it can be helpful to say something about how it behaves.

For example, we can talk about how a linear regression can or cannot capture the causal effect of X1 over Y. "It's not capturing the causal effect. It's just minimizing the squared error" is an unhelpful statement.

But do LLMs dream of electric sheep?

They certainly do after having read that script.

I would reverse your statement: when we dream, we are engaging in un-prompted confabulation, enaction of imaginary scenarios with known characters, pondering and replaying emotional or stressful events, back-propagating to update memory associations, and all in imaginary worlds unconstrained by various logical and physical laws.

Unprompted meaning we have shut down almost all sensory input (there seems to be some residual hearing and proprioception).

Thank you for an awesome, accurate post.

and, FWIW, confabulation is a lifetime terror for me -- with lucid dreams and https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/dream-catcher/201909...

i fully wonder if LLMs are just trying to fill in gaps in direct knowledge, and seeking the closest parable they can find. So definitely confabulation rather than hallucination

The way I conceptualize dream versus hallucinate, they're basically the same thing here and I see no reason to switch. It's not like the software has a sleep schedule.

And hearsay is usually a lot better than LLM output. I wouldn't use that word.

Did you try lucid dreaming? Do you think that our everyday perception of reality is not the same mechanism as dreaming?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com