"Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

The article says "well, sometimes what it makes is bad".

Well big deal. A lot of human-created art is awful too.

> It might be better to say that everything GPT does is a hallucination, since a state of non-hallucination, of checking the validity of something against some external perception, is absent from these models.

I try to explain this to people who are obsessed with using ChatGPT to tell them things. So far I've been telling them something like: "it does not attempt to provide you valid information, it's optimizing for what would read like a reasonable continuation of the conversation, which is really not the same thing."

> Unfortunately, this promotes a misunderstanding of how large language models (LLMs) work... It might be better to say that everything GPT does is a hallucination, since a state of non-hallucination, of checking the validity of something against some external perception, is absent from these models.

Let me turn it around:

> Unfortunately, this promotes a misunderstanding of how brains work... It might be better to say that every question a human answers without research is a hallucination, since a state of non-hallucination, of checking the validity of something against some external perception, is absent when simply answering a question.

Obviously nonsense. If you're going to write an article about misconceptions you'd better make sure you are right!

(Though it is silly to celebrate hallucinations; they're definitely not desirable.)

When a human thinks it’s able to determine the difference between imagination and fact, but when a human reads words on a screen it isn’t?

Drivel.