Expressing it that way removes a useful word from our vocab; when people say "halicinations" in this context it specifically means that the generated response does not match reality. If you say that it's just a coincidence when it's correct, and that it's hallicinations all the way down, how do you communicate succinctly to a human that AI responses are not necessarily bound in reality? (I mean in the specific case, not the general case).

Well, I might be taking a pessimistic view on it, but if you expressed it this way to the average user, they might pay more attention to what's actually there when an answer returns to them. I think they have in mind that the text is (generally) grounded in reality like how a human mind grounds things, and this is definitely a hurdle in understanding how these LLM machines work.

That is a matter of perspective. Generally hallucinations are considered to be the output that is not correlated to reality. You are correct that the same method is used for all output. If that were not the case then removing hallucinations would be trivial.

It's whatever is in the training data, plus some hacks. For example, if I ask ChatGPT when my birthday is it says "I don't have personal information on individuals"; but if I ask when King Charles III birthday is it tells me a date... which matches what's in Wikipedia... so it might be right. If there are lots of instances in the training data where the date is wrong, then it will just repeat that wrong date back to you as fact.

It might be able to produce true data about very famous individuals, and it might refuse to provide information about unknown individuals. But if you ask about a YouTuber, or a smaller star/celebrity, it is more likely to produce a false statement. I asked about the birthday of Tom Scott (the YouTuber) three times and got three different dates (and none supported by a Google search).

Yes, I agree. That's what I was trying to say. It also "doubles down" when called out: I asked about the mathematician Richard Taylor and it responded with a paragraph that called him Sir Richard Lawrence Taylor, so I asked when he was knighted (he wasn't) and it said "The 2014 birthday honours list" which is wrong... probably because there was a Dr Richard Thomas Taylor awarded an MBE (not a knighthood) in that list.

ChatGPT will confidently fabricate data out of thin air, it is less likely to admit it does not know something or is not sure. And that’s the primary problem with it: the statement is believable, but incorrect.

The 'hallucination' term is an unfortunate bit of anthropomorphisation. It's a machine for generating plausible text; sometimes the text is true, accidentally. This bears no particular resemblance to any conventional meaning of 'hallucination'.

You just described the human mind. What we see in our heads is wholly imagined, mostly correlated to reality. You see things clearly, without the huge empty spot in the middle or fuzzy black-and-white periphery. And usually without hallucinations, where our predictive minds miscalculates and adds in things to our imagined interior world that don't exist in reality.

I find that explaining errors and factual mistakes in LLMs or AI in general as hallucinations to be counter-productive. I don't know if the field has landed on a specific definition of what hallucination is, but I mostly associate it with garbled output from tokens like 'SolidGoldMagicKarp'[0] and 'davidjl'[1].

My understanding is that AI models like GPT have been able to convincingly convey the form of language, but not its meaning. It looks and sounds like how a human would communicate, but the AI is unable to imbue meaning into the words and sentences it produces. My knowledge of this comes from Lex Friedman's episode with Edward Gibson [2].

I think that's the fundamental issue with LLMs at the moment. It has managed to mostly exit the uncanny valley because, as far as most people are concerned, the text produced could just as well have been made by a human. I think this lends some credibility to the text produced by the LLM, because more or less all text ever produced has had a human behind it. This is no longer the case and as such there is bound to be a transitional period where we learn how to deal with this new technology.

[0]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aPeJE8bSo6rAFoLqg/solidgoldm...

[1]: https://twitter.com/goodside/status/1666598580319035392

[2]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=F3Jd9GI6XqE&t=230