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Google Search Is Now a Giant Hallucination
(gizmodo.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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Can we swap out the word "hallucinations" for the word "bullshit"?
I think all AI/LLM stuf should be prefaced as "someone down the pub said..."
So, "someone down the pub said you can eat rocks" or, "someone down the pub said you should put glue on your pizza".
Hallucinations are cool, shit like this is worthless.
Google search isnt a hallucination now though.
It instead proves that LLMs just reproduce from the model they are supplied with. For example, the "glue on pizza" comment is from a reddit user called FuckSmith roughly 11 years ago.
What do you mean by that? This isn't some secret but literally how LLMs work. lol What people mean by hallucinating is when LLMs "create" facts that aren't any. Be it this genius recipe of glue pizza, or any other wild combination of its model's source material. The whole cooking thing is a great analogy actually because it's like all of their fed information are the ingredients, and it just spits out various recipes based on those ingredients, without any guarantee that it is actually edible.
Yeah, but John Q. Public reads AI and thinks HAL 9000 and Skynet, and no additional will convince them otherwise.
There are a lot of people, including google itself, claiming that this behaviour is an isolated and basically blamed users for trolling them.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd11gzejgz4o
I was working on the concept of "hallucinations" being things returned that are unrelated to the input query, not directly part of the model as with the glue-pizza.
Your link does not match your statement.
That's precisely what they are saying.
I'm sorry but reading this as "Google blames users for trolling them" is either pure mental gymnastics or mental illness.
No, hallucination is a really good term. It can be super confident and seemingly correct but still completely made up.
It is, but it isnt applicable in at least the glue-pizza situation as the probable source comment has been found on reddit.
A better use of the term might be how when you try to get Bing's image creator to make "Battletech" art, you just mostly get really obvious Warhammer 40k Space Marines and occasionally Iron Maiden album art.
I think delusion might be a better word. You can hallucinate and know it's not real
My experience with certain chemicals suggests this is true.
That is just being WRONG.
for it to "hallucinate" things, it would have to believe in what it's saying. ai is unable to think - so it cannot hallucinate
So how do you prove it can't think? Or that you actually can?
because it's a text generation machine..? i mean, i wouldn't say i can prove it, but i don't think anyone can prove it's capable of thinking, much less of reasoning
like, it can string together a coherent sentence thanks to well crafted equations, sure, but i wouldn't qualify that as "thinking", though i guess the definition of "thinking" is debatable
It can tell you how to stack things on top of each other the best way to get a high tower. Etc.
Those are not random sentences. If you can not define thinking in a way this machine fails at, then stop saying it does not think.
A parrot can be trained to tell you how to stack things on top of each other the best way to get a high tower.
This is just an electronic parrot, millions of times faster to train than the biological parrot, specialized in repetition alone (can't really do anything else a parrot can) and which has been trained on billions of texts.
You're confusing one specific form in which humans externally express cogniscence with the actual cogniscence itself: just because intelligence can produce some forms of textual communication doesn't mean that the relationship holds in the opposite direction and such forms of textual communication require intelligence, or if you will, just because you can photograph a real pizza to get a picture of a pizza doesn't mean a picture of a pizza is actually of a real pizza and not something with glue to make it look like it has stringy melted cheese.
Again, it is absolutely capable to come up with it's own logical stuff, hence my example. Stop saying it just copies existing stuff, that is simply wrong.
Sure, whatever.
Amazing reply, given the context.
I'm actually a domain expert on AI whilst your "assertive denial without a single counter-argument" answer to my simplified explanation together with your "understanding" of the subject matter shown in the post before that one, shows you're at the peak of the Dunning-Krugger curve on this domain and also that you do not use analytical thinking or the scientific method in any way form or shape when analysing a subject.
There is literally no point in explaining anything to somebody who reasons like that and is at that point of that curve.
You keep your strongly held "common sense" beliefs and I'll keep from wasting any more of my time.
this paper clearly says it is capable of original thought. It also "speaks" of it in high regard in other things.
Re-read it: it says AI is capable of "originality" and does not mention "thought" at all.
You're the one presuming that "originality" requires cognition and hence understood "originality" as meaning "original thought" even though they're different concepts (specifically the latter is a subset of the former).
In your interpretation of that paper you did the exact same logical mistake as you seem to be doing in your interpretation of LLMs - you made assumptions backed only by gut feeling thus taking a leap to reach a conclusion ultimately supported only by your gut feeling.
"electronic parrot" and outperforming almost all humans in creativity and originality is an extreme contrast to me, regardless of my misuse of terms. So I fail to understand what you want to say, since this contrast must be apparent to you too.
The original context of my comment was even more basic and to me proven by what the paper says: Those are not things it copied somewhere. Also, I still think there is no test to prove it can/can't think.
interesting, in my experience, it's only been good at repeating things, and failing on unexpected inputs - it's able to answer pretty accurately if a small number is even or odd, but not if it's a large number, which indicates it's not reasoning but parroting answers to me
do you have example prompts where it showed clear logical reasoning?
Examples showing that it comes up with it's own solutions to an answer? Just ask it something that could not have been on the Internet before. Professor talking about AGI in GPT 4
Personal examples would be to code python to solve a 2D thermal heat flux problem given some context and constraints.
well, i just tried it, and its answer is meh --
i asked it to transcribe "zenquistificationed" (made up word) in IPA, it gave me /ˌzɛŋˌkwɪstɪfɪˈkeɪʃənd/, which i agree with, that's likely how a native english speaker would read that word.
i then asked it to transcribe that into japaense katakana, it gave me "ゼンクィスティフィカションエッド" (zenkwisuthifikashon'eddo), which is not a great transcription at all - based on its earlier IPA transcription, カション (kashon') should be ケーシュン (kēshun'), and the エッド (eddo) part at the end should just, not be there imo, or be shortened to just ド (do)
this paper says it is capable of original thought. It also "speaks" of it in high regard in other things. That is also my experience using it for... over a year?! now.
Hallucination is a technical term. Nothing to do with thinking. The scientific community could have chosen another term to describe the issue but hallucination explains really well what's happening.
huh, i kinda assumed it was a term made up/taken by journalists mostly, are there actual research papers on this using that term?
It used to mean all generated output though. Calling only mistakes hallucinations is new, definitely because of hype.
It's a really bad term because it's usually associated with a mind, and LLMs are nothing of the sort.
Anthropomorphication is hard to avoid in AI.
Many worthy things are difficult.
But is anthropomorphism of AI particularly worrying?
It is when the people tends to give more credence to entities that appear sentient and to have agency.
So is bullshitting. More so, only human minds can bullshit.
We anthropomorphize machines all the time, it's fine.
I'd prefer we'd start calling all genai output hallucinations again. It used to be like 10 years ago, but somewhere along the line marketing decided hallucinated truths aren't "hallucinations".
And a bull's anus.
It's fucking not, amd I'm not changing my mind about it.
I want an AI/LLM that has been trained exclusively on the technical documentation and a haynes manual for a make and model of car.
"Hey AI, how do I change the fuel filter and what tools will I need?"
If you have the PDFs of that, you can build it with two clicks in GCP
Manufacturers and dealers dont tend to make service bulletins and the high level stuff available to the consumer unfortunately.
You can sorta get that now if you play with it. I was building a driver a few months back and gave it the PDFs involved.
I don't even think hallucinations is the right word for this. It's got a source. It is giving you information from that source. The problem is it's treating the words at that source as completely factual despite the fact that they are not. Hallucinations from what I've read actually is more like when it queries it's data set, can't find an answer, and then generates nonsense in order to provide an answer it doesn't have. Don't think that's the same thing.
I don’t even think it’s correct to say it’s querying anything, in the sense of a database. An LLM predicts the next token with no regard for the truth (there’s no sense of factual truth during training to penalize it, since that’s a very hard thing to measure).
Keep in mind that the same characteristic that allows it to learn the language also allows it to sort of come up with facts, it’s just a statistical distribution based on the whole context, which needs a bit randomness so it can be “creative.” So the ability to come up with facts isn’t something LLMs were designed to do, it’s just something we noticed that happens as it learns the language.
So it learned from a specific dataset, but the measure of whether it will learn any information depends on how well represented it is in that dataset. Information that appears repeatedly in the web is quite easy for it to answer as it was reinforced during training. Information that doesn’t show up much is just not gonna be learned consistently.[1]
[1] https://youtu.be/dDUC-LqVrPU
I understand the gist but I don't mean that it's actively like looking up facts. I mean that it is using bad information to give a result (as in the information it was trained on says 1+1 =5 and so it is giving that result because that's what the training data had as a result. The hallucinations as they are called by the people studying them aren't that. They are when the training data doesn't have an answer for 1+1 so then the LLM can't do math to say that the next likely word is 2. So it doesn't have a result at all but it is programmed to give a result so it gives nonsense.
Yeah, I think the problem is really that language is ambiguous and the LLMs can get confused about certain features of it.
For example, I often ask different models when was the Go programming language created just to compare them. Some say 2007 most of the time and some say 2009 — which isn’t all that wrong, as 2009 is when it was officially announced.
This gives me a hint that LLMs can mix up things that are “close enough” to the concept we’re looking for.