Hacker News Reader

Is claiming that the year when the orange man first came into office a mistake, or a hallucination? Does the answer change based on whether it came from a human or an LLM?

How about citing legal cases that don't exist? I would say this is maybe closer to hallucination if an LLM is doing it. Maybe less so if a human is and is not experience some mental instability. What creates that distinction?

View on HN

I read a paper once (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10619792/pdf/pdig.0...) arguing that "confabulation" would be a more accurate term because it better matches the similar failure mode in humans, and perhaps that's true. It's just not the term that's won out. That may change, or psychologists may have to adopt a new term for what we currently call human hallucinations, the same way they had to develop a new term for what we used to call imbecility.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com