Post #3254186

2026-06-06 17:16 UTC

@grammargirl@zirk.us I don’t think we need to accept it just yet. The word is deceptive—intentionally so. What needs to be explained is this: chatbots and LLMs can't "hallucinate” because they have no minds or senses. They routinely depart from factuality because that's how they’re programmed: to generate plausible streams of text without regard to reality. (https://around.com/dont-trust-them/)

Replies (2)

@coolcalmcollected@mastodon.social 2026-06-06 17:57

@gleick@mas.to @grammargirl@zirk.us the consistent trend of anthropomorphizing badly written programs, and the machines the programs run on, is used to make tech CEO's as a religious ruling class. they create these facsimiles of truth and reality then prop themselves up as the sole interpreters and arbiters. like any religious hierarchy. they're relying on humans ingrained need to assign importance to random objects and events and an interpreter to hand out judgement in return for taking all their money.

Open ##3254187
@DaveMWilburn@infosec.exchange 2026-06-06 18:05

@gleick@mas.to @grammargirl@zirk.us IMO "confabulation" is more accurate than "hallucination" because the former indicates a lack of intent. Given that LLMs are not sentient, they lack intention. At most, they are reflexively responding to a reward function that optimizes towards producing text roughly resembling the pattern of their training data, but that's different from intent.

Open ##3254188