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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28780 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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LLMs hallucinate because of quirks in how their architecture works. Furthermore no one actually wants LLMs to hallucinate. No one thinks it's desirable.

The Russian military does not make use of LLMs (as far as I know) so any problems they have do not have the same root cause as LLM hallucinations. I'd pin most of their troubles on the fact that they severely underestimated the Ukrainian military and the amount of support they ended up getting from NATO. I don't know if those reports of commanders demanding false information are true or not, but if they are, that again seems to be very different from how people interact with LLMs - there the false information seems to actually be desirable, in contrast to LLM hallucinations which are never desirable.

Furthermore no one actually wants LLMs to hallucinate. No one thinks it's desirable.

Aren’t hallucinations how they role play and create hypotheticals, fantasy environments and other creative items?

All analogies and comparisons break down at some level. The way I understood the comparison is that the model goal of "predict next word" produced "correct" but repetitive answers. Therefore the parameter of temperature was added, so that the model can go and explore some novel ground and go off the track a little bit. It is the other side of the hallucination, it is almost impossible to prevent it. Also probably because one man's hallucination is other man's creative work.

It's not a "quirk" it is a foundational component of their architecture, and what I'm suggestion is that this component is pressent not just in LLMs but in academia and the broader category of secular progressive social institutions as well. The Russian military might not make use of LLMs but they certainly make use of the latter and in contrast to your claim that hallucinations are never desirable I posit that they plainly are otherwise we would not be observing the behavior that we have observed.

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