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Comment by mattjoyce | Hacker News Reader

Hallucination seems a very dated term.

Why? It's the same concept and root cause it was when we first started using it.

Hallucination is accurate for what I'm seeing -- e.g. it's making up information about the 2nd gen Toyota Tundra that has no basis in reality. When challenged, it corrects itself.

My colleague wanted to diagnose a specific error code on his car himself, and Gemini told him that it's simple to do with an OBD2 dongle - he asked it about the details thoroughly, to confirm, and bought the dongle.

It didn't work. Gemini: "Oh yeah, that obviously cannot work, it's not possible to do it through OBD2" (paraphrasing)

It was quite funny to me, but a bit less so to my colleague.

I've had many similar experiences. It's confidently incorrect to a shocking degree. Worse than ChatGPT from two years ago.

Its always been a bad term. If we wanted an accurate term then it's 'confabulation', but 'muddled' or just 'wrong' are also good.

What do we use for the “model made stuff up and claimed it as facts”? I can see hallucinations somehow anthropomorphizing LLM even more. I don’t like that we’re doing that to begin with but it’s a losing battle. I prefer “it’s broken” and “IT produced shit results” personally.

I agree with you, except I really don't hear that term much. People just say it wrong or confused. Good riddance, it was always a bad term.

They still happen.

there are many dated expressions, including

- AI is just a tool, like excel; it does what the human operating it tells it to

- next token prediction cannot be true understanding

- models can have no desires and goals, don't anthropomorphize it

However, "hallucination" is very much not one of them

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