[INDOLOGY] AI hallucinations

[Antonia Ruppel]

I think the simple rule for using AI for knowledge purposes is: use it to
do grunt work in cases where it is easier for you to proof the result than
to do the work yourself. I've been using DeepSeek to generate running vocab
commentaries (that then still take a fair while to get from being 75-80% to
being actually correct); friends of mine who write code say that they find
doing this themselves a lot easier than asking AI to do it and then
checking the result for the inevitable bugs.

AI is made to sound convincing; when you ask it about something where you
don't know the answer, you have no way of knowing whether what it tells you
is right or just sounds right. It *is* good for brainstorming if you're
looking for ideas and then intend to follow up on the answers it gives you
to check whether any of the references (to articles, legal precedents,
historical events or Pāṇinian rules) refer to things that actually exist.

And of course, the constant use of AI that its creators are trying to push
us towards uses up huge amounts of natural resources (such as
drinking-quality water to cool the machinery) and requires the generation
of larger amounts of energy than can be safely generated if we are serious
about wanting to prevent further climate change.

Antonia

On Sun, 21 Sept 2025 at 16:28, Madhav Deshpande via INDOLOGY <
indology at list.indology.info> wrote:

> Several times when I asked ChatGPT and other AI chatbots something about
> Panini, it gave me rules that were irrelevant and with wrong numbers.
> Cannot trust these chatbots for specifics.
>
> Madhav M. Deshpande
> Professor Emeritus, Sanskrit and Linguistics
> University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
> Senior Fellow, Oxford Center for Hindu Studies
> Adjunct Professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India
>
> [Residence: Campbell, California, USA]
>
>
> On Sun, Sep 21, 2025 at 7:03 AM Harry Spier via INDOLOGY <
> indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>
>> Thank you Claudius,
>> I've wondered if in additional to this statistical generation of the text
>> there was some kind of "algorithmic monitoring" to eliminate undesirable
>> answers (undesirable for perhaps good reasons or not so good reasons) .
>>
>> For example a few months ago, when AI was coming up on the list, I typed
>> into google "what are the advantages of AI" and got an AI generated
>> paragraph or two. But when I then typed in "What are the disadvantages of
>> AI" into Google, I did not get any AI generated answer.  A few weeks later
>> I did the same experiment and the situation had changed. I got AI generated
>> answers in google for both "What are the advantages of AI" and "What are
>> the disadvantages of AI?".
>>
>> Harry Spier
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Sep 21, 2025 at 8:03 AM Claudius Teodorescu <
>> claudius.teodorescu at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Dear Harry,
>>>
>>> You gave an excellent definition on how the text is generated. The
>>> probabilities for what word comes next are extracted from the input texts
>>> (so no syntactic or semantic rules, just statistics).
>>>
>>> Besides these probabilities, there are also random number generators,
>>> which are used for variations of the generated text.
>>>
>>> So, nothing new or creative could appear, only what was entered, and
>>> most of the times in a distorted form.
>>>
>>> Claudius Teodorescu
>>>
>>> On Sun, 21 Sept 2025 at 14:19, Mauricio Najarro via INDOLOGY <
>>> indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Just in case people find it useful, here’s an important and well-known
>>>> critique of LLMs from people currently working and thinking carefully about
>>>> all this: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922
>>>>
>>>> Mauricio
>>>>
>>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>>>
>>>> On Sep 21, 2025, at 11:47 AM, Harry Spier via INDOLOGY <
>>>> indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> 
>>>> Csaba Dezso wrote:
>>>>
>>>> My question to the AI savvies among us would be: is confabulation /
>>>>> hallucination an integral and therefore essentially ineliminable feature of
>>>>> LLM?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I have an extremely limited knowledge and experience  of AI but my
>>>> understanding of LLM's is that they work by choosing the next most
>>>> statistically  likely word in their answer (again I'm not exactly clear how
>>>> they determine that),  So there answers aren't based on any kind of
>>>> reasoning.
>>>> Harry Spier
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Cu stimă,
>>> Claudius Teodorescu
>>>
>>
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