As @autolycos points out, AI/LLMs don’t actually hallucinate. They confabulate. This is also called “making shit up”. For example, when a person with severe dementia tells you a very plausible story about how they arrived at the ER today, but five minutes later they tell a completely different tale, they are confabulating. Their brain knows they should have a story, so they just start filling gaps. LLMs do this. It is unpredictable, and extremely hard to detect in a written result.
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@autolycos now, I suspect people started calling this hallucination because some of the original examples seemed to just pull something from thin air, and besides, it makes the LLM sound silly. The reality is, the LLM is Making Shit Up. This MSU problem is an unfixable disaster. Imagine trying to read a two page story about someone else’s day, and find the one line in 100 (which is about the rate) that is just made up shit. How much concentration does that take?
@mcnado @autolycos yes, this study coins a similar word to describe this phenomenon 🫠
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
Also relevant is the whole collection