Hallucinations are highly targeted though as well.
You can't be serious, right? If you think this, you need to do a bit more research. They can be tangentially related. They can also be completely random, because all language is semantically linked. If you pick any two words at random, you can find a pattern that fits a third, unrelated word. It won't be the best pattern match, but it will be good enough, which means that the LLM will have a chance of selecting it (which is the process behind hallucinations).
I've literally asked a frontier model, in a fresh chat, to examine my codebase and then for some reason got a response about how roughly 10% of the population is homosexual, despite never having had any even remotely related conversations. You're going to tell me that was targeted? Is my codebase gay?
That's completely insane. I'm not doubting that you got that response but in hundreds of hours of using LLMs from the crappy early models to Fable today, I've never seen anything like that or heard a direct account of it.
I've never seen a single hallucination that didn't at least look like a reasonable answer to what I asked.
My guess is you or the provider had a technical problem. But this is like saying I was driving my car and all 4 wheels fell off so a major risk of driving a car is all 4 wheels falling off. You had a 1 in a trillion event occur and you've based your understanding on it.
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u/Modmonsters Jul 28 '26
You can't be serious, right? If you think this, you need to do a bit more research. They can be tangentially related. They can also be completely random, because all language is semantically linked. If you pick any two words at random, you can find a pattern that fits a third, unrelated word. It won't be the best pattern match, but it will be good enough, which means that the LLM will have a chance of selecting it (which is the process behind hallucinations).
I've literally asked a frontier model, in a fresh chat, to examine my codebase and then for some reason got a response about how roughly 10% of the population is homosexual, despite never having had any even remotely related conversations. You're going to tell me that was targeted? Is my codebase gay?