So hallucinations are something like cancer, it will have sooner or later, in another words, it is inevitable.
it will happen sooner or later*
LLMs Will Always Hallucinate, and We Need to Live with This
231–240 of 274 posts
Re: LLMs Will Always Hallucinate, and We Need to Live with This
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
> can kind of make things up but still make them believable This is the definition of a bullshitter , by the way.
Or, you know, fiction writer. Some of us like little stories.
Its important that anyone reading fiction knows its fiction.
Without that we can run into a situation where a fictional story on the radio convinces the public that we are under alien attack in what could be called a war of the worlds.
Re: LLMs Will Always Hallucinate, and We Need to Live with This
#233We don’t need to “live with this”. We can just not use them, ignore them, or argue against their proliferation and acceptance, as I will continue doing.
I want to use them. Lots of other people do, too. Feel free to get left behind.
You're assuming that the ending is already written and the long term value of LLMs is already known.
Someone not using them could get left behind if LLMs turn out that to have a consistent multiplier effect on productivity. That person also may not actually care about being "left behind".
Someone not using them could also save a bunch of time and effort if LLMs don't pan out and don't add a meaningful value over the long run. That's not to say they don't add any value, LLMs could be relegated to the role of a much better predictive text engine that gets used regularly but isn't itself a large enough gain to leave anyone behind for not using predictive text.
Re: LLMs Will Always Hallucinate, and We Need to Live with This
#234We don’t need to “live with this”. We can just not use them, ignore them, or argue against their proliferation and acceptance, as I will continue doing.
This is "anti-progress", and we must always pursue progress even if it leads us to a self-made reality-melting hellmouth. Onward to Wonderland, I say!
Gotta love "progress" as the ultimate goal. Ignore how you got here, whether you made a wrong turn, or even if you're happy as-is and don't need to change. Just keep pushing forward and moving around the deck chairs!
Re: LLMs Will Always Hallucinate, and We Need to Live with This
#235Incomplete training data is kind of a pointless thing to measure. Isn’t incomplete data the whole point of learning in general? The reason why we have machine learning is because data was incomplete. If we had complete data we don’t need ml. We just build a function that maps the input to output based off the complete data. Machine learning is about filling in the gaps based off of a prediction. In fact this is what…
Yes, but it also makes a huge difference whether we are asking the model to interpolate or extrapolate. Generally speaking, models perform much better on the former task, and have big problems with the latter.
Without any ability to reason about the known facts, are we better off with LLMs trying to interpolate at all rather than acting as a huge search space that returns only references?
If an LLM has the exact answer needed it could simply be returned without needing to be rephrased or predicted at all.
If the exact answer is not found, or if the LLM attempts to paraphrase the answer through prediction, isn't it already extrapolating? That doesn't even get to the point where it is attempting to combine multiple pieces of training data or fill in blanks that it hasn't seen.
Re: LLMs Will Always Hallucinate, and We Need to Live with This
#236> By establishing the mathematical certainty of hallucinations, we challenge the prevailing notion that they can be fully mitigated Having a mathematical proof is nice, but honestly this whole misunderstanding could have been avoided if we'd just picked a different name for the concept of "producing false information in the course of generating probabilistic text". "Hallucination" makes it sound like something is goi…
"Hallucinations" just means that occasionally the LLM is wrong. The same is true of people, and I still find people extremely helpful.
Humans can also spend an entire lifetime (or more, across multiple generations) being absolutely, inexorably and violently certain they are correct about something and still be 100% wrong.
I am not disagreeing that either people or LMMs are not extremely helpful in many or most instances. But if the best we can do with this technology is to make human-comparable mistakes WAY faster and more efficiently, I think as a species we’re in for a lot more bad times before we get to graduate to the good times.
Re: LLMs Will Always Hallucinate, and We Need to Live with This
#237LLMs will go the way of the 'expert systems'. We're gonna wonder why we ever thought that was gonna happen.
I just recommend you don't pidgeonhole yourself and an AI professional because it's gonna be awfully cold outside pretty soon.
Re: LLMs Will Always Hallucinate, and We Need to Live with This
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly this, I've been saying this since the beginning. Every response is a hallucination - a probabilistic string of words divorced from any concept of truth or reality. By total coincidence, some hallucinations happen to reflect the truth, but only because the training data happened to generally be truthful sentences. Therefore, creating something that imitates a truthful sentence will often happen to also be trut…
Maybe they shouldn’t have mixed truthful data with obviously untruthful data in the same training data set? Why not make a model only from truthful data? Like exclude all fiction for example.
1) It's impossible to get enough data to train one of these well while also curating it by hand.
2) Even if you could, randomly sampling from a probability distribution will cause it to make stuff up unless you overfitted on the training data. An example that's come up in thread is ISBNs—there isn't going to be enough signal in the training set to reliably encode sufficiently high probability strings for all known ISBNs, so sometimes it will just string together likely numbers.
Re: LLMs Will Always Hallucinate, and We Need to Live with This
#239> By establishing the mathematical certainty of hallucinations, we challenge the prevailing notion that they can be fully mitigated Having a mathematical proof is nice, but honestly this whole misunderstanding could have been avoided if we'd just picked a different name for the concept of "producing false information in the course of generating probabilistic text". "Hallucination" makes it sound like something is goi…
I prefer the clearer term "bullshit"
Re: LLMs Will Always Hallucinate, and We Need to Live with This
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Human readable, makes grammatical sense, and wrong . And no, that's often not subjective.
It's very subjective. An LLM could return statements like "Global warming is real and man-made", and it also could produce a result like "Global warming is a hoax", and it's definitely up to the reader as to whether the LLM is "hallucinating". It doesn't matter how readable or grammatically correct the LLM is, it's still up to the reader to call bullshit, or not.
I said often not subjective. When it says that there are two "r"s in "strawberry", it is wrong, and it is not subjective at all. There's no wiggle room. It's wrong.