who is "celebrating" hallucinations?
I've only heard of people trying to "solve" them.
"Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong
81–90 of 196 posts
Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong
#82AI hallucinations are the opposite of creativity. They give the most obvious wrong answer possible. For example, ask an AI about an unknown basketball player, it will probably describe it at fit and tall, because that's how we expect basketball players to be. That may be a good observation, but certainly not creativity. If instead it told the story of someone short and obese, with details on how he got to play basket…
Creating doesn't mean having to maxmize entropy either. Lots of good stories keep very close to the "obivous" or the well-known.
Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
What seems plausible depends on your level of suspect matter expertise. Hallucinations are in general ridiculously incorrect and nowhere close to anything worth testing. Put another way what percentage of molecules are worth testing as a viable treatment for epilepsy? 1 in 100 trillion, less? Do you really expect hallucinations to generally pick both plausible and untested targets here?
That's not my experience with the leading models, & I'm seeing others observe even when LLMs are wrong, they often supply interesting potential avenues to consider (especially in the coding-assistant/debugging domains). Also, techniques for tamping-down hallucinations are improving rapidly, with teams finding... • ways to detect likely hallucinations from patterns in internal activations • extra conditioning to reduc…
Reducing hallucinations is useful but doesn’t imply that the remaining hallucinations are going to be valuable.
In terms of coding the costs of an LLM using some API function that doesn’t exist isn’t that high because we have tools to detect such nonsense and can look at the API in question. In science people don’t get to read realities underlying API’s.
Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong
#84AI hallucinations are the opposite of creativity. They give the most obvious wrong answer possible. For example, ask an AI about an unknown basketball player, it will probably describe it at fit and tall, because that's how we expect basketball players to be. That may be a good observation, but certainly not creativity. If instead it told the story of someone short and obese, with details on how he got to play basket…
Right, this is also why we don't see breakthroughs in science or literature from AI.
Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong
#85AI hallucinations are the opposite of creativity. They give the most obvious wrong answer possible. For example, ask an AI about an unknown basketball player, it will probably describe it at fit and tall, because that's how we expect basketball players to be. That may be a good observation, but certainly not creativity. If instead it told the story of someone short and obese, with details on how he got to play basket…
Is creativity something innate in humans, or can it be learned? I would argue that if a human can learn creativity then an AI can too. By the way, here's GPT-4 "Write a description of an unlikely basketball player. Be creative."
> Meet Ethel, a 4'9" grandmother of six, with a penchant for knitting and a mastery of Sudoku. With bifocal glasses perched on her nose, she's far from your typical basketball star. But what Ethel lacks in height and athleticism, she makes up for with an uncanny sixth sense for predicting opponents' moves and an underhand free-throw that rivals the best in the league. With her floral-print headband and orthopedic shoes squeaking down the court, she's both an anomaly and a secret weapon on her community center's basketball team.
Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Language models (the computation) "care" about making "correct" predictions (correct of course being determined by the data). This is why the simplest solution to reducing hallucinations is just making them more competent/better predictors (more neurons, more data). If the prediction can benefit from all the knowledge/reasoning it has accumulated from training, it'll tap that first. One of the biggest tells of halluc…
> Language models (the computation) "care" about making "correct" predictions Predictions of what? LLMs aren't predicting anything. They are, as the GP says, generating text that appears to be fluent and coherent (as long as we don't inquire into actual semantic relationships with anything else) in the context of the prompt.
They are quite literally trained to predict a distribution that could supply the next token given previous context. This is their primary objective.
Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "The LLM AI technology generation is optimized to be fluently conversational and not to be factually correct all the time." I always find this point a bit odd because humans aren't "optimized" to be correct either. > "LLMs have no understanding of the underlying reality" I struggle with this one because I see both sides of it. I was making a prompt the other day and gave a CSV file as an input and told the LLM if c…
> humans aren't "optimized" to be correct either Humans at least have a concept of "being correct", even if we don't always set that as our primary goal when communicating. LLMs don't even have a concept of "being correct". That would require having a concept of an "external world" that text refers to, which LLMs don't have. All they have is the text in their training data.
>LLMs don't even have a concept of "being correct"
They clearly do as plenty research indicates. You've just decided not to accept this. Pure confirmation bias in action.
Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong
#88I really didn't think anyone was applauding the "hallucinations" but maybe I just hang around people who aren't visionaries.
I've seen more and more of it over the past few weeks. I work in clinical trials and just recently saw the claim that hallucinations can help researchers "expand the search space for molecules they didn't consider." I'm doubtful...
I mean, statistically it's maybe bound to happen but if it's drowned by bullshit it's probably not a very useful method anyway due to running costs.
Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong
#89I remember when MIT used to do things. Same with RPI and Stanford. Now they just do papers.
Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong
#90AI hallucinations are the opposite of creativity. They give the most obvious wrong answer possible. For example, ask an AI about an unknown basketball player, it will probably describe it at fit and tall, because that's how we expect basketball players to be. That may be a good observation, but certainly not creativity. If instead it told the story of someone short and obese, with details on how he got to play basket…
Right, this is also why we don't see breakthroughs in science or literature from AI.
How do you recognize a breakthrough in literature ?