"hallucination refers to the generation of plausible-sounding but factually incorrect or nonsensical information"

Is an output an hallucination when the training data involved in that output included factually incorrect data? Suppose my input is "is the would flat" and then an LLM, allegedly, accurately generates a flat-eather's writings saying it is.

Accuracy and hallucination are two ends of a spectrum.

If you turn hallucinations to a minimum, the LLM will faithfully reproduce what's in the training set, but the result will not fit the query very well.

The other option is to turn the so-called temperature up, which will result in replies fitting better to the query but also the hallucinations go up.

In the end it's a balance between getting responses that are closer to the dataset (factual) or closer to the query (creative).

The enemy is at the same time too strong and too weak.

There is nothing intelligent about "AI" as we call it. It parrots based on probability. If you remove the randomness value from the model, it parrots the same thing every time based on it's weights, and if the weights were trained on Harry Potter, it will consistently give you giant chunks of harry potter verbatim when prompted.

Most of the LLM services attempt to avoid this by adding arbitrary randomness values to churn the soup. But this is also inherently part of the cause of hallucinations, as the model cannot preserve a single correct response as always the right way to respond to a certain query.

LLMs are insanely "dumb", they're just lightspeed parrots. The fact that Meta and these other giant tech companies claim it's not theft because they sprinkle in some randomness is just obscuring the reality and the fact that their models are derivative of the work of organizations like the BBC and Wikipedia, while also dependent on the works of tens of thousands of authors to develop their corpus of language.

In short, there was a ethical way to train these models. But that would have been slower. And the court just basically gave them a pass on theft. Facebook would have been entirely in the clear had it not stored the books in a dataset, which in itself is insane.

I wish I knew when I was younger that stealing is wrong, unless you steal at scale. Then it's just clever business.