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@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@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@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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--
Cu stimă,
Claudius Teodorescu