Consciousness? I dunno about that. Does an ant on the right drugs not hallucinate?

I agree though that it's a bad term for what current LLMs do. "Confabulate" seems closer.

> Does an ant on the right drugs not hallucinate?

I think we have no way of knowing, just like we don't know if an ant has consciousness or not.

There's neuroscience research on hallucinations, for example https://www.math.utah.edu/~bresslof/publications/01-3.pdf "What Geometric Visual Hallucinations Tell Us about the Visual Cortex". The word "conscious" does not appear.

> The results are sensitive to the detailed specification of the lateral connectivity and suggest that the cortical mechanisms that generate geometric visual hallucinations are closely related to those used to process edges, contours, surfaces, and textures.

Now this example is only one theory, but it shows that serious people can talk in these terms about hallucination and expect to be understood and not have to argue past reviewer #2, without this whole question vitiating their discussion.

Also, btw, we don't fully know that GPT-4 is not conscious, if you really think it matters. When the question comes up, people who are certain it's not usually point to the fact that it's not running continuously, as if that had any bearing on the question.

Statistical fallout of unexpected words droppings.

We humans call it "misspeaking".

Speak quickly, often enough, and without sufficient training and yule misspeak.

"Wrong", "a fail-state", "I'm sorry, Dave". Any of these do anything for ya?

Non consistent databases is how i’d call these chat toys. We made software to get accurate results but now they want to sell us the idea that a system that consistently produces inaccurate results is good … because it “hallucinates” just like hoomans. As if that’s what we needed from machines in the first place, to mimics our limitations.

confabulate: to replace the gaps left by a disorder of the memory with imaginary remembered experiences consistently believed to be true (Collins)