Hallucination is inevitable: An innate limitation of large language models

Re:Hallucination is inevitable: An innate limitation of larg... by resolutebat on Sunday February 25, 2024 @06:14AM (#39499843)

Humans do hallucinate, there's lots of literature on how memories are distorted, we see and hear things we want to see and hear, etc.

The particular pathology of LLMs is that they're literally incapable of distinguishing facts from hallucinations even in the most mundane circumstances: if a human is asked to summarize the quarterly results of company X, unlike an LLM they're highly unlikely to recite a convincing but completely fabricated set of numbers.

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Re:Hallucination is inevitable: An innate limitation of larg... by exe34 on Sunday February 25, 2024 @06:27AM (#39499935)

And yet if you ask a random person at a rally about their favourite cause of the day, they usually spew sound bites that are factually inaccurate, and give all impressions of being as earnest and confident as the LLM making up quarterly results.

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Re:Hallucination is inevitable: An innate limitation of larg... by jprete on Sunday February 25, 2024 @07:48AM (#39500367)

I think that case is complicated at best, because a lot of things people say are group identity markers and not statements of truth. People also learn to not say things that make their social group angry with them. And it's difficult to get someone to reason through the truth or falsehood of group identity statements.

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Re:Hallucination is inevitable: An innate limitation of larg... by exe34 on Sunday February 25, 2024 @08:54AM (#39500831)

I guess it's similar to what Chris Hitchens was getting at, you can't reason somebody out of something they didn't reason themselves into.

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