There is an effort to eliminate hallucination from LLMs. I believe
such efforts are misnamed and harmful. Instead, call the behavior
"an exercise of imagination". True AGI will require this.<p>Mary Warnock, in two essays in The Uses Of Philosophy[0], makes the
case that imagination is fundamental to human versus animal.<p>From the essay "Religious Imagination" [p176] I quote:<p>"Kant, I believe, has the truth about imagination in his view, or at
least a great deal of the truth about the acquisition of knowledge.
For it must be the case that, if we are to claim knowledge and
understanding of the phenomena of the world, whether scientific or
'common-sense' knowledge, we must be able to bundle these phenomena
together under general concepts in order to frame laws about them (not
necessarily the refined laws of science, but, just as much, the basic,
assumed laws of the practical life). Neither words nor ideas on their
own, nor mere perception (sensory experience by itself, if we can
conceive of such a thing), would be enough to enable us to see in what
is in front of our eyes the exemplification of something common to
that thing and others. It is this function, to relate sensory
experience to concepts, that Kant describes as imagination.<p>Whether we give a name to the power to go beyond our experience or
not, we are bound to recognize that this is something we can do; and
that if we could not, we could neither understand nor describe the
world about us, or understand or describe ourselves. To say this is
as much as to say that it is nearly impossible to separate from one
another the various factors that go to make up our perception and
interpretation of the world; sensory experience, sorting into kinds,
projecting into past and future, reacting with pleasure or pain to
what we perceive."<p>From the essay "Personal Continuity" [p204]<p>"For, in reflecting on his own life, a man ... may perceive his life,
or try to do so, as a whole, as a plot with himself as the central
character. And it is at this point that memory and imagination overlap
and intertwine. For imagination must not be thought of as the faculty
that gives rise merely to fiction or fancy, though it may do that. Its
central function, as both Hume and Kant understood, is to bring
coherence and universality to what would otherwise be a random and
unintelligible sequence of impressions appearing before the mind like
the shadow puppets in Plato's cave. It is the primary function of the
imagination to find the general and universal in the particular, to
find significance in an otherwise incoherent world."<p>[0] Mary Warnock "The Uses Of Philosophy" (1992) ISBN 978-0631185833