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Comment by BaculumMeumEst | Hacker News Reader

Similar suggestions have been made over and over, and they've never stuck. "Hallucinating" has already hit mainstream media. It's probably going to stay that way out of sheer inertia because nobody outside of a small group of nerds on hackernews is going to sit down and think about whether "hallucinating" or "confabulating" more accurately describes the nature of the error. The existing term already captures the general idea well enough.

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And here I thought us nerds ruled the world.

The millenium parties were all on New Year's Eve of 2000, not New Year's Eve of 2001. Some nerds had to be worrying about Y2K date/time bugs instead of partying too.

The true nerds would be partying the next year with the millinium ending/beggining on Jan 1, 2001.

Exactly. Pretty lonely endeavor.

What exact date do you think "New Year's Eve of 2000" is? 2000-12-31?

It was the eve of the new year, the evening that started at the end of 1999-12-31 and ended in time for brunch on 2000-01-01. I was partying with the fun people after arguing the numbers for a few days in 1998 or 1999.

Hard disagree. I’m browsing the internet not surfing the Information Super Highway. Mainstream media needs to rely less on allegory once technology becomes mainstream.

LLMs aren't mainstream yet. When they are, it will simply be common cultural knowledge that they can (lie,hallucinate,confabulate,whatever) and metaphors won't be necessary, the way the internet became mainstream once it was common knowledge not to "feed trolls" or "click on spam."

At the moment, most people still think LLMs are basically like the computers from Star Trek, rational, sentient and always correct. Like those lawyers who used ChatGPT to generate legal arguments - it didn't even occur to them that AI could fabricate data, they assumed it was just a search engine you could talk to like a person.

This is why we still need metaphors to spread cultural knowledge. To that end I think it's less important to be technically accurate than to impart an idea clearly. "Hallucinate" and "confabulate" get the same point across, but the former is more widely understood.

Even "confabulate" isn't great, since it carries the connotation of either deception or senility/mental illness. But the "confabulation" of LLMs is inherent to their design. They aren't intended to discern truth, or accuracy, but statistical similarity to a stream of language tokens.

And humans don't really do that, so we don't really have language fit to describe how LLMs operate without resorting to anthropomorphism and metaphors from human behavior.

But hallucinating is not an allegory... Just like we're still using browsing.

> I’m browsing the internet not surfing the Information Super Highway.

Hard disagree. You're browsing the Web not exploring the Internet.

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