Generative AI - Understand and Mitigate Hallucinations in LLMs

Have you ever wondered if AI could dream? Interestingly, AI doesn’t dream, but it does “hallucinate”.

Large Language Models (LLMs) like PaLM or GPT occasionally demonstrate this intriguing behavior called hallucination.

As the use of these models increases in various applications, understanding and managing these hallucinations has become essential.

Understanding LLM Hallucinations

An LLM hallucination is when the model makes stuff up that either doesn’t make sense or doesn’t match the information it was given. In such cases, the model answers sound plausible but are incorrect.

The subheading of this article is admittedly a bit provocative. The term ‘hallucinations’ isn’t my favorite. It would be more accurate and straightforward to say that the model gives wrong answers. There are no such things as hallucinations with LLMs

Additionally, I see a clear difference between responding made-up answers and answering based on outdated data. Later one can be mitigated by training or integrating more up-to-date data.

Podcast

I had the pleasure of talking with Ben and Ryan from the Stack Overflow podcast about hallucinations.