My boss trusts me to be able to accurately check the quality of parts I weld. That’s literally my job. It’s not blind trust, I’d lose my job if I couldn’t consistently produce good results, but once I was trained to do my job I can be left to my own devices. You can’t do that with an LLM because you’d still need a human to double-check to make sure it didn’t hallucinate that the part was correctly welded.
That’s the difference - intelligent beings, once they understand something, can be trusted. Obviously if they don’t understand something, like the fact that the Earth is round, then you can’t trust them. Intelligence still requires education and training, but the difference is that educating and training intelligent beings actually produces consistent results that can be relied on.
Notably, “hallucinate” is actually a term invented by the companies behind LLMs. It’s not really accurate, because hallucination still implies intelligence. They’re just pattern recognition engines, they don’t “hallucinate” they just don’t have any idea what the patterns mean or why they happen. B follows A, that’s all it knows. If a sequence occurs where C follows A it makes a mistake and we call that “hallucination” even though it’s really just a mindless machine churning thoughtlessly repeating the patterns it was trained on.
Your boss expects you to weld with good quality but they don’t expect you to answer every question there is, without any mistakes. The problem with LLMs is that they are trained purely on text found on the internet but they have no “life experience” and thus there world model is very different from ours. There are overlaps (that’s why they can produce any coherent output at all) but there are situations that make perfect sense in its world model, that’s complete bogus in the real world.
It’s a bit like the shadows in Platons cave allegory. LLMs are practically trained only on the shadows and so the output is completely based on that shadow world. LLMs can describe pain (because it was in the training data) but it was never smacked in the face.
That’s exactly why we can’t really call them intelligent or knowledgeable. They’re pattern recognition engines, they mindlessly recognize and repeat patters even when they don’t make any sense i.e. “hallucinate”
They’re a productivity tool that can help actually intelligent and knowledgeable beings like humans do tasks, but on their own they are a parking lot covered with shredded dictionaries. If we use the Chinese room analogy, it’d be like trying to build a Chinese room with just the translation dictionary and without the human to do the translating.
Which is why LLMs make mistakes when translating too - they need a human, a real intelligence, to check.
Humans are also “pattern recognition engines”. That’s why optical illusions and similar completely mess with our brains. There are patterns that we perceive as moving/rotating even though the pattern is completely stationary.
But nobody would claim that you can’t trust your eyes in general just because optical illusions exist.
My boss trusts me to be able to accurately check the quality of parts I weld. That’s literally my job. It’s not blind trust, I’d lose my job if I couldn’t consistently produce good results, but once I was trained to do my job I can be left to my own devices. You can’t do that with an LLM because you’d still need a human to double-check to make sure it didn’t hallucinate that the part was correctly welded.
That’s the difference - intelligent beings, once they understand something, can be trusted. Obviously if they don’t understand something, like the fact that the Earth is round, then you can’t trust them. Intelligence still requires education and training, but the difference is that educating and training intelligent beings actually produces consistent results that can be relied on.
Notably, “hallucinate” is actually a term invented by the companies behind LLMs. It’s not really accurate, because hallucination still implies intelligence. They’re just pattern recognition engines, they don’t “hallucinate” they just don’t have any idea what the patterns mean or why they happen. B follows A, that’s all it knows. If a sequence occurs where C follows A it makes a mistake and we call that “hallucination” even though it’s really just a mindless machine churning thoughtlessly repeating the patterns it was trained on.
Your boss expects you to weld with good quality but they don’t expect you to answer every question there is, without any mistakes. The problem with LLMs is that they are trained purely on text found on the internet but they have no “life experience” and thus there world model is very different from ours. There are overlaps (that’s why they can produce any coherent output at all) but there are situations that make perfect sense in its world model, that’s complete bogus in the real world.
It’s a bit like the shadows in Platons cave allegory. LLMs are practically trained only on the shadows and so the output is completely based on that shadow world. LLMs can describe pain (because it was in the training data) but it was never smacked in the face.
That’s exactly why we can’t really call them intelligent or knowledgeable. They’re pattern recognition engines, they mindlessly recognize and repeat patters even when they don’t make any sense i.e. “hallucinate”
They’re a productivity tool that can help actually intelligent and knowledgeable beings like humans do tasks, but on their own they are a parking lot covered with shredded dictionaries. If we use the Chinese room analogy, it’d be like trying to build a Chinese room with just the translation dictionary and without the human to do the translating.
Which is why LLMs make mistakes when translating too - they need a human, a real intelligence, to check.
Humans are also “pattern recognition engines”. That’s why optical illusions and similar completely mess with our brains. There are patterns that we perceive as moving/rotating even though the pattern is completely stationary.
But nobody would claim that you can’t trust your eyes in general just because optical illusions exist.
We can tell optical illusions are fake specifically because we aren’t just pattern recognition engines.
LLMs “hallucinate” because they can’t do that. To them, the optical illusion is reality.
That’s the difference between intelligence and knowledgeability, instead of merely containing knowledge.