• ALostInquirer@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    Why do tech journalists keep using the businesses’ language about AI, such as “hallucination”, instead of glitching/bugging/breaking?

    • xthexder@l.sw0.com
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      6 months ago

      Because hallucinations pretty much exactly describes what’s happening? All of your suggested terms are less descriptive of what the issue is.

      The definition of hallucination:

      A hallucination is a perception in the absence of an external stimulus.

      In the case of generative AI, it’s generating output that doesn’t match it’s training data “stimulus”. Or in other words, false statements, or “facts” that don’t exist in reality.

      • ALostInquirer@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        perception

        This is the problem I take with this, there’s no perception in this software. It’s faulty, misapplied software when one tries to employ it for generating reliable, factual summaries and responses.

        • xthexder@l.sw0.com
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          6 months ago

          I have adopted the philosophy that human brains might not be as special as we’ve thought, and that the untrained behavior emerging from LLMs and image generators is so similar to human behaviors that I can’t help but think of it as an underdeveloped and handicapped mind.

          I hypothesis that a human brain, who’s only perception of the world is the training data force fed to it by a computer, would have all the same problems the LLMs do right now.

      • ALostInquirer@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        Isn’t it more accurate to say it’s outputting incorrect information from a poorly processed prompt/query?

        • vithigar@lemmy.ca
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          6 months ago

          No, because it’s not poorly processing anything. It’s not even really a bug. It’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do, spit out words in the “shape” of an appropriate response to whatever was just said

          • ALostInquirer@lemm.ee
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            6 months ago

            When I wrote “processing”, I meant it in the sense of getting to that “shape” of an appropriate response you describe. If I’d meant this in a conscious sense I would have written, “poorly understood prompt/query”, for what it’s worth, but I see where you were coming from.

      • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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        6 months ago

        Honestly, it’s the most human you’ll ever see it act.

        It’s got upper management written all over it.

      • ALostInquirer@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        It’s not a bad article, honestly, I’m just tired of journalists and academics echoing the language of businesses and their marketing. “Hallucinations” aren’t accurate for this form of AI. These are sophisticated generative text tools, and in my opinion lack any qualities that justify all this fluff terminology personifying them.

        Also frankly, I think students have one of the better applications for large-language model AIs than many adults, even those trying to deploy them. Students are using them to do their homework, to generate their papers, exactly one of the basic points of them. Too many adults are acting like these tools should be used in their present form as research aids, but the entire generative basis of them undermines their reliability for this. It’s trying to use the wrong tool for the job.

        You don’t want any of the generative capacities of a large-language model AI for research help, you’d instead want whatever text-processing it may be able to do to assemble and provide accurate output.