It's like generating code in a language that you know nothing about. You should check for bugs, but you can't.
Confabulation is the unintended generation of false memories.
Hallucination is false perception.
Clearly, the phenomenon we are seeing with LLM researchers call Hallucination better fits Confabulation.
It's not perceiving reality incorrectly, it's presenting wholesale fiction as fact both coherently and with absolute confidence. It even forges supporting documentation ad-hoc.
GPT is not a poor schizophrenic suffering from delusions or innocuous "hallucinations." It is the world's most advanced liar.
These are worse as they imply the thing generating the words knows the truth and purposely says something else.
An LLM is just doing next token prediction. It's a mathematical process. It's not trying to "hide" the truth from you.
Lies, BS, and Con artistry all require conscious motive and intent. Thats a bridge to far, for me, in ascribing ‘intelligence’ to these models.
Hallucination, to me, conveys ‘seeing things (facts) that are not there’. To the extent the models are ‘perceiving’, they ARE perceiving reality incorrectly. Granted, I expect many times it’s because the source of the model training data are, at best, just wrong or are lying.
Besides,
> it's presenting wholesale fiction as fact both coherently and with absolute confidence
That is not in any way distinct from perceiving reality incorrectly. It is a symptom common to both skilled lying and hallucination.
IMO, so long as you're aware the information is often subtly wrong, it's not that different from, e.g., physics classes progressively lying to you less to allow your brain to build a framework to house the incoming ideas.
