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Comment by Guthur | Hacker News Reader

That has never been the definition of hallucination, until LLMs. It's actually just called lying, dishonesty or falsehood.

Hallucination is a distortion (McKenna might say liberation) of perception. If I hallucinate being covered in spiders, I don't necessarily go around saying, "I'm covered in spiders, if you cant see them you're blind" (disclaimer: some might, but that's not a prerequisite of an hallucination).

The cynic in me thinks that use of the word hallucination is marketing to obscure functional inadequacy and reinforce the illusion that LLMs are some how analogous to human intelligence.

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"Hallucination" is what LLMs are always doing. We only name it that when what they imagine doesn't match reality as well as we'd like, but it's all the same.

Lying, dishonesty, and falsehood all imply motive/intent, which is not likely the case when referring to LLM hallucinations. Another term is "making a mistake," but this also reinforces the similarities between humans and LLMs, and doesn't feel very accurate when talking about a technical machine.

Sibling commenter correctly calls out the most similar human phenomenon: confabulation ("a memory error consisting of the production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world" per Wikipedia.)

IMHO Lying means thinking one thing and saying another, hiding your true internal state. For it to be effective it also seems to require something like “theory of mind” (what does the other person know / think that I know).

I believe the term hallucination comes from vision models, where the model would "hallucinate" an object where none exists.

Wouldn't 'illusion' be the more precise term here ? When one thinks he recognizes something, whereas 'hallucination' is more of unreal appearing out of the blue ?

You might be thinking of deepdream... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepDream

"Hallucinations" have only really been a term of art with regards to LLMs. my PhD in the security of machine learning started in 2019 and no-one ever used that term in any papers. the first i saw it was on HN when ChatGPT became a released product.

Same with "jailbreaking". With reference to machine learning models, this mostly came about when people started fiddling with LLMs that had so-called guardrails implemented. "jailbreaking" is just another name for an adversarial example (test-time integrity evasion attack), with a slightly modified attacker goal.

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