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Comment by cess11 | Hacker News Reader

There is no difference between "hallucination" and "soberness", it's just a database you can't trust.

The response to your query might not be what you needed, similar to interacting with an RDBMS and mistyping a table name and getting data from another table or misremembering which tables exist and getting an error. We would not call such faults "hallucinations", and shouldn't when the database is a pile of eldritch vectors either. If we persist in doing so we'll teach other people to develop dangerous and absurd expectations.

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No it's absolutely not. One of these is a generative stochastic process that has no guarantee at all that it will produce correct data, and in fact you can make the OPPOSITE guarantee, you are guaranteed to sometimes get incorrect data. The other is a deterministic process of data access. I could perhaps only agree with you in the sense that such faults are not uniquely hallucinatory, all outputs from an LLM are.

I don't agree with these theoretical boundaries you provide. Any database can appear to lack in determinism, because data might get deleted, corrupted or mutated. Hardware and software involved might fail intermittently.

The illusion of determinism in RDBMS systems is just that, an illusion. The reason why I used the examples of failures in interacting with such systems that I did is that most experienced developers are familiar with those situations and can relate to them, while the probability for the reader to having experienced a truer apparent indeterminism is lower.

LLM:s can provide an illusion of determinism as well, some are quite capable of repeating themselves, e.g. overfitting, intentional or otherwise.

This seems unnecessarily pedantic. We know how the system works, we just use "hallucination" colloquially when the system produces wrong output.

If the information it gives is wrong, but is grammatically correct, then the "AI" has fulfilled its purpose. So it isn't really "wrong output" because that is what the system was designed to do. The problem is when people use "AI" and expect it will produce truthful responses - it was never designed to do that.

You are preaching to the choir.

But the point is that everyone uses the phrase "hallucinations" and language is just how people use it. In this forum at least, I expect everyone to understand that it is simply the result of next token generation and not an edge case failure mode.

I would have thought to assume that, but given how many on HN throw about how LLM's can think, reason, understand I think it does bear clearly defining some of the terms used.

Other people do not, hence the danger and the responsibility of not giving them the wrong impression of what they're dealing with.

Sorry, I'm failing to see the danger of this choice of language? People who aren't really technical don't care about these nuances. It's not going to sway their opinion one way or another.

It promotes the view that LLM:s are minds.

Yep. All these do is “hallucinate”. It’s hard to work those out of the system because that’s the entire thing it does. Sometimes the hallucinations just happen to be useful.

"Eldritch vectors" is a perfect descriptor, thank you.

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