this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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Google rolled out AI overviews across the United States this month, exposing its flagship product to the hallucinations of large language models.

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 5 months ago (7 children)

No, hallucination is a really good term. It can be super confident and seemingly correct but still completely made up.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It is, but it isnt applicable in at least the glue-pizza situation as the probable source comment has been found on reddit.

A better use of the term might be how when you try to get Bing's image creator to make "Battletech" art, you just mostly get really obvious Warhammer 40k Space Marines and occasionally Iron Maiden album art.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

That's not hallucinations (in particular), that's concept bleed. Try the following:

  1. Acquire a human experimental subject. Ask them:
  2. What colour is snow?
  3. What colour is the fridge (point to a white fridge)?
  4. What do cows drink?

...and hear them answer "milk". "White, cold, drink, cow" are all wired to "milk" in our heads logic comes later. It's quite a bit harder to trick humans with this than AIs because we do have the capacity to double-check but if you simply want to bend an answer, not have it be completely nonsensical, it's quite easy.

Also your 40k or Iron Maiden result might very well still be Battletech. E.g. when it comes to image composition. Another explanation would be low resolution in the prompt encoding, that'd be similar to boomers calling your PS5 a Nintendo. Most likely though it has only seen two or three Battletech images (face it, it's not that popular in comparison) and thought "eh looks like a Nintendo that's where I'll store it", Humans and current-gen AI are different in principle in that regard as we can come up with encoding strategies, they can't. Something something T3 systems and need for exponential amounts of data.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

That is just being WRONG.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

You just described entirety of reddit and last I checked we didn’t call that hallucinating

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

It's a really bad term because it's usually associated with a mind, and LLMs are nothing of the sort.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (2 children)

So is bullshitting. More so, only human minds can bullshit.

We anthropomorphize machines all the time, it's fine.

I'd prefer we'd start calling all genai output hallucinations again. It used to be like 10 years ago, but somewhere along the line marketing decided hallucinated truths aren't "hallucinations".

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

So is bullshitting. More so, only human minds can bullshit.

And a bull's anus.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

We anthropomorphize machines all the time, it's fine.

It's fucking not, amd I'm not changing my mind about it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Anthropomorphication is hard to avoid in AI.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Many worthy things are difficult.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

But is anthropomorphism of AI particularly worrying?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

It is when the people tends to give more credence to entities that appear sentient and to have agency.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I think delusion might be a better word. You can hallucinate and know it's not real

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

My experience with certain chemicals suggests this is true.