Hallucinate seems like a good word for image-producing neural nets (which is probably where it’s use originated?). Confabulate might be a better word for talkative LLMs, and less good for images.
I wonder if any neuroscientists or psychologists agree about humans and neural nets being similar this way. It’s less than unlikely that the mechanisms are the same between people and LLMs saying not true things. Aside from there being a wide variety of reasons people fabricate untrue things, we already know the mechanisms for neural net hallucinations and confabulations. It’s a non-self-aware machine designed to output tokens or pixels or whatever, it will turn the crank and spit out something with no concept of whether it’s true or not at all times. People, on the other hand, are often using emotion to drive what they say (and often without knowing it). People will sometimes rationalize their confabulations, sometimes say untrue things based on belief, sometimes say things driven by fear or embarrassment, sometimes lie because they have ulterior motives. None of these things apply to neural nets, so the similarity between human and NN confabulations seems at best limited to superficial summaries, no?
I wonder if any neuroscientists or psychologists agree about humans and neural nets being similar this way. It’s less than unlikely that the mechanisms are the same between people and LLMs saying not true things. Aside from there being a wide variety of reasons people fabricate untrue things, we already know the mechanisms for neural net hallucinations and confabulations. It’s a non-self-aware machine designed to output tokens or pixels or whatever, it will turn the crank and spit out something with no concept of whether it’s true or not at all times. People, on the other hand, are often using emotion to drive what they say (and often without knowing it). People will sometimes rationalize their confabulations, sometimes say untrue things based on belief, sometimes say things driven by fear or embarrassment, sometimes lie because they have ulterior motives. None of these things apply to neural nets, so the similarity between human and NN confabulations seems at best limited to superficial summaries, no?