AI Hallucination Legal Cases Database
damiencharlotin.com
damiencharlotin.com
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.
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
That's what words are, anyway.
0 (featured previously on HN) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
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.
I'm a descriptivist. I don't believe language should have arbitrary rules, like which kinds of words you're allowed to end a sentence with.
However, to be an honest descriptivist, you must acknowledge that words are used in certain ways more frequently than others. Definitions attempt to capture the canonical usage of a word.
Therefore, if you want to communicate clearly, you should use words the way they are commonly understood to be used.
True. And that's generally how they order the definitions in the dictionary, in order of usage.
For example, "an unfounded or mistaken impression or notion" is indeed the 2nd definition in M-W for "hallucination", not the first.
It's also equally wrong. Lying implies intent. Stop anthropomorphising language models.
A person with dementia confabulates a lot, which entails describing reality "incorrectly";, but it's not quite fair to describe it as lying.
"Making things up" is precise but wordy. "Lying" is good enough, obvious, and concise.
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.
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.
Why do you believe they could give you a confidence rating? They can't, at least not a meaningful one.
Depends on the context, doesn't it? Nothing is usually 100% worthless or 100% "worthy", there are grey areas in life where we're fine with "kind of right, most of the time". Are you saying these scenarios absolutely never exists in your world? I guess I'd be grateful if my life was so easy always.
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.
The word “hallucination” was pretty appropriate for images made by DeepDream.
For instance, if you give AI a photo and ask it to describe in detail what it seems, it will often report things that aren’t there. That’s not confabulation, that’s hallucination. But if you ask a general knowledge question with no additional context and it responds with something untrue, then that would be confabulation, I agree.
That battle is both lost and irrelevant. Don’t confuse accurate word usage with effective communication, most people don’t understand the nuance between hallucination and confabulation nor do they care. Even if you convinced everyone in the world to start using “confabulation” right now, nothing would change.
You’re doing a disservice to your own cause by insisting on this pointless weak distinction. If you truly want to make a point about the issue with LLMs in a way anyone outside of HN might pay attention, suggest a simpler and stronger word people already know: “lying”, “bullshitting”, …
You can surely object to those suggestions: “LLMs don’t lie. That would require active deception which they are incapable of, being statistical token generators”. Which is true, but:
1. There are plenty of people who both believe LLMs are intelligent and capable of deception.
2. For everyone else, “bullshitted” is no more inaccurate than “hallucinated” yet still conveys a stronger urgency and required care of operation.
And this matters, because this database is only the fabrications which got caught. What happens when a decision is formulated based on AI-fabricated evidence, and that decision becomes precedent?
Here in the US, our legal system is already having its legitimacy assailed on multiple fronts. We don't need additional legitimacy challenges.
How about disbarring lawyers who present confabulated evidence?