Comment by user43928
8 hours ago
And why not?
For all that I saw over the last few hundred hours with AI on software engineering, hallucinations are no longer a problem at all.
Not once have I seen a task fail due to what would have been a "hallucination". If they still occur, they can apparently be detected and corrected automatically, or are subtle enough to escape notice with presumably no significant impact on the results.
Why would this not also be the case for mathematics?
I think OP is saying that hallucination or not is just semantics. There is nothing qualitatively different about hallucinated vs non-hallucinated output.
That's true in the same sense as "There is nothing qualitatively different about erroneous vs non-erroneous output" for a dog vs. cat image classifier.
Wait, I dislike that one, and I think it's because we've lost-track of the fundamental problem with "hallucination" framing: It falsely assumes "normal" thought/sight occurs most of the time and is simply failing a bit.
To preserve that theme, consider: "There is nothing qualitatively different about Hostile prophecies from Your Friend the Prophetic 8-ball."
To be fair, I guess the line is blurry between what could be labelled a regular mistake compared to a hallucination.
"Test suite passed" when it actually errored? Obvious hallucination, unless it ran a command that returned the wrong error code.
But is running a malformed command that does not achieve the expected effect itself a hallucination?
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