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A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse

nytimes.com

1–10 of 28 posts

Re: A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse

#2
So, in reference to the "reasoning" models that the article references, is it possible that the increased error rate of those models vs. non-reasoning models is simply a function of the reasoning process introducing more tokens into context, and that because each such token may itself introduce wrong information, the risk of error is compounded? Or rather, generating more tokens with a fixed error rate must, on average, necessarily produce more errors?

Re: A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse

#3
This may be an issue with default settings:

"Modern LLMs now use a default temperature of 1.0, and I theorize that higher value is accentuating LLM hallucination issues where the text outputs are internally consistent but factually wrong." [0]

0 - https://minimaxir.com/2025/05/llm-use/

Re: A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse

#4
post #2

So, in reference to the "reasoning" models that the article references, is it possible that the increased error rate of those models vs. non-reasoning models is simply a function of the reasoning process introducing more tokens into context, and that because each such token may itself introduce wrong information, the risk of error is compounded? Or rather, generating more tokens with a fixed error rate must, on avera…

Its a symptom of asking the models to provide answers that are not exactly in the training set, so the internal interpolation that the models do probably runs into edge cases where statistically it goes down the wrong path.

Re: A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse

#5
I wish we called hallucinations what they really are: bullshit. LLMs don’t perceive, so they can’t hallucinate. When a person bullshits, they’re not hallucinating or lying, they’re simply unconcerned with truth. They’re more interested in telling a good, coherent narrative, even if it’s not true.

I think this need to bullshit is probably inherent in LLMs. It’s essentially what they are built to do: take a text input and transform it into a coherent text output. Truth is irrelevant. The surprising thing is that they can ever get the right answer at all, not that they bullshit so much.

Re: A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse

#6
post #5

I wish we called hallucinations what they really are: bullshit. LLMs don’t perceive, so they can’t hallucinate. When a person bullshits, they’re not hallucinating or lying, they’re simply unconcerned with truth. They’re more interested in telling a good, coherent narrative, even if it’s not true. I think this need to bullshit is probably inherent in LLMs. It’s essentially what they are built to do: take a text input…

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Re: A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse

#10
post #5

I wish we called hallucinations what they really are: bullshit. LLMs don’t perceive, so they can’t hallucinate. When a person bullshits, they’re not hallucinating or lying, they’re simply unconcerned with truth. They’re more interested in telling a good, coherent narrative, even if it’s not true. I think this need to bullshit is probably inherent in LLMs. It’s essentially what they are built to do: take a text input…

Or maybe we could stop anthropomorphizing tech and call the "hallucinations" what they really are: artifacts introduced by lossy compression.

No one is calling the crap that shows up in JPEGs "hallucinations" or "bullshit"; it's commonly accepted side effects of the compression algorithm that makes up shit that isn't there in the original image. Now we're doing the same lossy compression with language and suddenly it's "hallucinations" and "bullshit" because it's so uncanny.

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