Hacker News Reader

Comment by singingfish | Hacker News Reader

I'm really cross that the word "hallucination" has taken off to describe this as it's clearly in incorrect word. The correct word to describe it is "confabulation", which is clinically more accurate and a much clearer descriptor of what's actually going on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation

View on HN

I proposed[1] the portmanteau "hallucofabulation" as a compromise, but it hasn't caught on yet. I'm totally shocked and dismayed by this, of course.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36977935

The re-use of the "c" as a soft c in "hallucinate" and then a hard c in confabulate is confusing, and probably affecting the uptake of your neologism.

Yes, it would probably have to be halucinfabulation for purely phonetic reasons.

Maybe if I added a hyphen? "halluco-fabulation"?

would lead to hafabulation. Still not acceptable in my view - confabulation is clearly the correct term

It would probably help if you didn't drop the "n" from the confabulation part.

but confabulation sufficiently describes the phenomenon without the need for ugly neologisms.

It's "fabrication", plain and simple.

Fully agreed that "hallucination" is a bonkers word for it — sensational and melodramatic. But few people know what a confabulation is, and moreover it's an overly complex way to describe the phenomenon.

The LLM is making something up. It's a fabrication.

It's not fanciful; it's not spooky; it's mundane, as it should be.

Fabrication implies making things up for the sake of it. Confabulation is similar but is defined by making things up due to some limitation in capacity.

That’s a great word for some types of hallucinations. But some things that are called hallucinations may not be memory errors.

Please can you give an example of what might not be a memory error. Not that I think "memory error" is the right phrase either.

I was thinking along the lines of answering with correct information but not following the prompts. Maybe this could be considered confabulation also.

My view is that hallucination is something related to the interpretation of reality. It's not really directly mapping to memory at all. The mechanisms of confabulation entirely surround the gluing together of memories, and what are these models other than some sort of representation of memory.

I believe that you can also cause something a bit like a transient dysphasia by giving them bad inputs as well, so there is that on the language production side. However there's still nothing that pertains to the experience aspects central to what hallucinations actually are.

Disagree. One seems more innocent and neutral, the other seems like it is trying to lie to you.

I prefer "error" but would be OK with "mistake".

The problem with "hallucination" and "confabulation" is that they both imply a consciousness.

I'm not sure that's correct. Hallucination definitely implies some sort of connection to reality, confabulation does not, it implies some kind of hard to detect error in stitching memories together coherently

Technically, then everything it's doing are errors just with varying degrees of precision.

It's still just probabilistic babble. We were doing this with markov chains.

I think hallucination is better and more accurate at it implies a bit of imagination and buffoonery deceit.

I don’t think confabulate matches as well as it implies confusion or mixture of different ideas.

ChatGPT isn’t confused, it’s making things up. It’s trying to bullshit as best it can in hope that what it makes up convinces its user.

That making things up based on memories of past things is entirely what confabulation is. Bullshitting in the large as it were. I've met quite a few clinical confabulators (people with Korsakov syndrome and the like) and I find the parallels remarkable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com