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416 points floverfelt | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.26s | source
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oo0shiny ◴[] No.45057794[source]
> My former colleague Rebecca Parsons, has been saying for a long time that hallucinations aren’t a bug of LLMs, they are a feature. Indeed they are the feature. All an LLM does is produce hallucinations, it’s just that we find some of them useful.

What a great way of framing it. I've been trying to explain this to people, but this is a succinct version of what I was stumbling to convey.

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jstrieb ◴[] No.45060348[source]
I have been explaining this to friends and family by comparing LLMs to actors. They deliver a performance in-character, and are only factual if it happens to make the performance better.

https://jstrieb.github.io/posts/llm-thespians/

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1. bo1024 ◴[] No.45063090[source]
This is also related to the philosophical definition of bullshit[1]: speech intended to persuade or influence without any active intention to be either true or false.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit