Using the term "Hallucination" makes it sound less problematic, less impactfull for user.

They should have used the term "error". For example in statistics, there many kinds of errors, discretization error, prediction error, sampling error, ...

https://www.statisticshowto.com/errors-in-statistics/

I’m not sure either would is particularly good at describing what is happening.

Error in implies something broke, which nothing broke the LLM did exactly what they where designed to do generate text based on a statistically likely bases.

Hallucination Does really fit here either. It implies it’s experiencing something that is not there which it isn’t experiencing anything.

> In any other software it would be an error, regression, bug.

How is "bug", literally an organism with a will of its own that you cannot control, any less of a weasel word?

Totally weasel words in this time frame. I think in 10 years after everyone has a better understanding of what we are dealing with these weasel words would maybe make sense. Right now it seems more sensible to deem this at best a false positive, or glitch, or if it must be anthropomorphized a screw up or a f' up. I don't think the llms are dehydrated. Although that's funny on another level. Edited: to be less abrasive

error, regression, bug, bullshit are not weasel words, hallucination is a weasel word because why exactly? your argument is a weasel argument.

For humans hallucinations are a particular class of error, so I find hallucination more descriptive than either error or bug.

I also think it’s relevant because a hallucinator often doesn’t recognize that the hallucination isn’t real. That’s more accurate for the LLM than either lie or confabulation, IMO. They algorithm is trained to produce strings of text that have semantic meaning based on some statistical likelihood of tokens appearing next to each other. The LLM algorithm is working as intended.

Hallucinations are also often emergent from a particular state or situation, which reflects the generative aspect of LLMs.

Hallucinations are sometimes resolved in humans by grounding exercises. “Touching grass.” The same is true for LLM hallucinations. Inaccuracies are found by cross-checking the output against an internet search or another LLM.

I disagree, for me "error" is way, way more accurate than "hallucination", but i did take applied statistics in college and that might have influenced my vocabulary. Maybe that for the general public, "hallucination" is a better description, i might have biases in this case. But "error" is _definitely_ more accurate.

If people want to call "drisse", "aussière", "balancine" and "ecoute" all as "boat ropes", they are correct. In english, i would certainly call them all "boat ropes" in any case, as i never needed to translate their names. It isn't the most accurate in my opinion, but as long as you're not working on them (or manning a boat in my analogy), who cares.

Broken is a little hyperbolic.

Lots of perfectly viable and everyday products are not perfectly reliable.

Medicine is not 100% reliable. My car isn't 100% reliable. Hell, my phone and cellular network are not 100% reliable.

They are all still extremely useful tools. I might want them to be even better, but that's a cost versus quality question.

LLMs are useful because (and inasmuch as) their output generally reflects coherent reality.

And their output does, usually, reflect coherent reality.

The problem class of "properly operating program emits output incompatible with coherent reality" is something that is reasonable to put under its own term, considering it's a new class of problem.

In other words, I think you misunderstand the language others are using. "Hallucination" doesn't refer to an "error" in the sense that crashing is an error, it refers to a situation in the problem class above, which is compatible with it working correctly every time.

> it doesn’t “think” it predicts the next token.

I never said it did. And I agree that LLMs don't "think". That said I am fully willing to go to bat arguing "thinking tokens" is a perfectly fine piece of jargon. Metaphors are completely acceptable parts of language, and contextual meaning is something grasped by everyone including the pedants who pretend not to.

> From the point of view of the system, this is an error. It is incorrect information.

Which system?

The LLM has no _concept_ of "correct". It emits output, based on its input and internal state.

If that output happens to be correlated with reality, then it's useful. If it doesn't, and this is not a creative exercise, it's not useful.

Everything an LLM emits is equal to it. It's all confabulation - this it says that is not based on facts, because it also has no concept of fact. Value judgements you make about the output is all you.

"Confabulation" is no less anthropomorphizing than "hallucination".

a filling in of gaps in memory through the creation of false memories by an individual who is affected with a memory disorder (as Korsakoff syndrome) and is unaware that the fabricated memories are inaccurate and false

vs.

a sensory perception (such as a visual image or a sound) that occurs in the absence of an actual external stimulus and usually arises from neurological disturbance (such as that associated with delirium tremens, schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, or narcolepsy) or in response to drugs (such as LSD or phencyclidine)

Yes, but when a statistical model give you an erroneous result, you call the output an error, not a bug. I think error is more appropriate here. The error can be a sampling error, an inference error, or yes, a software error (or bug)

The word "confabulation" is much more precise and appropriate than "hallucination". We should use it instead.

I believe the word was already in use to denote a malfunction of any sort of machine or device. As such this was a bug (insect) that caused a bug (glitch); it was punny already in 1947.

neat part of history, but i dont think that's what that says.

the last sentence starts with "Originating with Thomas Edison in the 1800s, the term “bug” is still used [...]", and there would be no reason to use the word "actual" in the sentence "First _actual_ case of bug being found" if it was the origin of the term.

my clanker found this: https://spectrum.ieee.org/did-you-know-edison-coined-the-ter...

"The use of “bug” to describe a flaw in the design or operation of a technical system dates back to Thomas Edison. He coined the phrase 140 years ago to describe technical problems during the process of innovation."

the moth seems to be a popular misconception, though, given that the article starts with "Ask someone to identify the first computer bug, and he or she might mention computer programmer Grace Hopper and the dead moth found in a relay of Harvard University’s Mark II electromechanical computer in 1947"