Talking about hallucinations lets us talk about undesired output as a completely different thing than desires output, which implies it can be handled somehow.
The problem it the LLM can only ever output bullshit. Often the bullshit is decent and we call it output, and sometimes the bullshit is wrong and we call it hallucination.
But it’s the exact same thing from the LLM. You can’t make it detect it or promise not to make it.
You can’t make it detect it or promise not to make it.
This is how you know these things are fucking worthless because the people in charge of them think they can combat this by using anti hallucination clauses in the prompt as if the AI would know how to tell it was hallucinating. It already classified it as plausible output by creating it!
“On two occasions I have been asked, – “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” … I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question”
Its been over a hundred years since this quote and people still think computers are magic.
Agree, the term is misleading.
Talking about hallucinations lets us talk about undesired output as a completely different thing than desires output, which implies it can be handled somehow.
The problem it the LLM can only ever output bullshit. Often the bullshit is decent and we call it output, and sometimes the bullshit is wrong and we call it hallucination.
But it’s the exact same thing from the LLM. You can’t make it detect it or promise not to make it.
This is how you know these things are fucking worthless because the people in charge of them think they can combat this by using anti hallucination clauses in the prompt as if the AI would know how to tell it was hallucinating. It already classified it as plausible output by creating it!
They try to do security the same way, by adding “pwease dont use dangerous shell commands” to the system prompt.
Security researchers have dubbed it “Prompt Begging”
Its been over a hundred years since this quote and people still think computers are magic.