> "Hallucination" implies that the LLM holds some relationship to truth. Output from an LLM is not a hallucination, it's bullshit[0].

I understand your perspective, but the intention was to use a term we've all heard to reflect the thing we're all thinking about. Whether or not this is the right term to use for scenarios where the LLM emits incorrect information is not relevant to this post in particular.

> No we don't. It's really complicated. That's why diets are popular and real dietitians are expensive.

No, this is not why real dietitians are expensive. Real dietitians are expensive because they go through extensive training on a topic and are a licensed (and thus supply constrained) group. That doesn't mean they're operating without a grounding fact base.

Dietitians are not making up nutritional evidence and guidance as they go. They're operating on studies that have been done over decades of time and millions of people to understand in general what foods are linked to what outcomes. Yes, the field evolves. Yes, it requires changes over time. But to suggest we "don't know" is inconsistent with the fact that we're able to teach dietitians how to construct diets in the first place.

There are absolutely cases in which the confounding factors for a patient are unique enough such that novel human thought will be required to construct a reasonable diet plan or treatment pathway for someone. That will continue to be true in law, health, finances, etc. But there are also many, many cases where that is absolutely not the case, the presentation of the case is quite simple, and the next step actions are highly procedural.

This is not the same as saying dietitians are useless, or physicians are useless, or attorneys are useless. It is to say that, due to the supply constraints of these professions, there are always going to be fundamental limits to the amount they can produce. But there is a credible argument to be made that if we can bolster their ability to deliver the common scenarios much more effectively, we might be able to unlock some of the capacity to reach more people.

Exactly! All LLMs do is “hallucinate”. Sometimes the output happens to be right, same as a broken clock.

I find this way of looking at LLMs to be odd. Surely we all are aware that AI has always been probabilistic in nature. Very few people seem to go around talking about how their binary classifier is always hallucinating, but just sometimes happens to be right.

Just like every other form of ML we've come up with, LLMs are imperfect. They get things wrong. This is more of an indictment of yeeting a pure AI chat interface in front of a consumer than it is an indictment of the underlying technology itself. LLMs are incredibly good at doing some things. They are less good at other things.

There are ways to use them effectively, and there are bad ways to use them. Just like every other tool.

The problem is they are being sold as everything solutions. Never write code / google search / talk to a lawyer / talk to a human / be lonely again, all here, under one roof. If LLM marketing was staying in its lane as a creator of convincing text we'd be fine.

This happens with every hype cycle. Some people fully buy into the most extreme of the hype, and other people reverse polarize against that. The first group ends up offsides because nothing is ever as good as the hype, but the second group often misses the forest for the trees.

There's no shortcut to figuring out what the truth of what a new technology is actually useful for. It's very rarely the case that either "everything" or "nothing" is the truth.

I think a lot of problems will be solved by explicitly training on high quality content and probably injecting some expert knowledge in addition

Yeah but that's not easy, which is why it wasn't done in any of the cases where it's needed.

>I find this way of looking at LLMs to be odd.

It's not about it being perfect or not. It's about how they come about with the responses they do.

>Very few people seem to go around talking about how their binary classifier is always hallucinating, but just sometimes happens to be right.

Yeah, but no one is anthropomorphizing binary classifiers.

You imply that, like a stopped clock, LLMs are only right occasionally and randomly. Which is just nonsense.

It's true, though. It strings together plausible words using a statistical model. If those words happen to mean something, it's by chance.

Sure, but that chance might be 99.7%. 'Random' isn't a pejorative.

Although I get what you're saying, it's still true that if something is wrong randomly at any point, it is always "randomly wrong".

Same is true of humans fwiw.

Very true, I think LLMs will be very good at confirming whatever bias you have. Want to find reasons why unpasturized milk is good? Just ask an LLM. Want to find evidence to be an antivaxxer? Just ask an LLM!

No self-reflection needed.