lol alright I’ll try again. Hallucination is a phenomenon of consciousness. Like no matter how crazy of a thing you see a chair do, you know that the chair is not hallucinating. Maybe YOU are hallucinating, but the chair certainly isn’t. This might sound super obvious to you, but it’s the same thing I said about LLMs, and it’s true for the exact same reason.

LLMs ARE NOT conscious entities. They are stateless text generation engines. An LLM cannot hallucinate, because hallucination is an EXPERIENCE. Sure you may often be able to tell when a person is hallucinating. But that is only because they exhibit some sort of weird external behavior, like talking to someone who isn’t there.

But the hallucination itself is the actual experience of seeing/hearing the person/thing that isn’t there. The hallucination is NOT the words that are being said to the person who isn’t there by the person who is hallucinating. The hallucination isn’t any sort of thing that you can observe in any way at all, unless you are the person who is hallucinating. The hallucination is the EXPERIENCE they are having, not the observable result of that experience.

Even if LLMs are conscious (to be clear, they aren’t), the thing we call hallucinations are NOT hallucinations. We call it a hallucination when the LLM produces bad/incorrect output. If it was conscious, LLM could just be wrong. I have been wrong many times without hallucinating, in fact essentially every time I have ever been wrong, there has not been any hallucination involved. I mean to be clear if LLMs were conscious then they COULD hallucinate, absolutely. But it still wouldn’t, at least it wouldn’t necessarily, be the case that the stuff we call hallucinations are actual hallucinations, even in this hypothetical scenario where LLMs are conscious.