LLM HALLUCINATION

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 Large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT are prone to a phenomenon called “hallucinations”, in which fabricated or false information is presented as fact.

What Does a Hallucination Look Like?

While testing the AICYC process we captured one hallucinaton in the wild. SAM asked LLM to write an article about Sphynx Cats by providing knowledge graph node data for that topic as a prompt. The hallucination appeared in the following section that LLM wrote about the Sphynx cat in popular culture. The full article follows.

“Sphynx Cats have been featured in various forms of media, including movies, television shows, and books. Some notable examples include the character Bambi in the movie “Meet the Parents,” and the cats Punkie and Paloma in the book “The Cat Who…” series by Lilian Jackson Braun.”

Someone passionate about Sphynx cats would be fascinated about the movie and book roles described here by LLM. Few readers would be familiar with the movie or book but may be interested enough to purchase the book or stream the movie. But they would be disappointed and out-of-pocket since no Sphynx cat appear in either.

If the reader is not familiar with the books or movie LLM mentions it could take the paragraph as fact. This can happen when reading content on the web that deliberately misinforms with novel or nonexistent facts. A cautious reader or editor would fact check. Here are the facts.

The 1940s movie and name Bambi has cultural significance and is widely known. But in that movie Bambi was a fawn, a baby deer. LLM claimed Bambi was a character in “Meet the Parents” a social comedy. LLM declares that Bambi is a Sphinx cat? And what about the next two cats Punkie and Paloma that HAL featured as Sphynx cats in the book series The Cat Who… by the author Lilian Jackson Braun?

I did the usual human editor fact checking. First thing I found is there is no reference to a Bambi character in the movie “Meet the Parents.” . I checked iMDB and the Wikipedia article to be sure. I even found an early movie with the same name and no Bambi in it. I asked the LLM directly and was told a Sphynx cat named “Mr. Jinx” was in the movie. Turns out Mr. Jinx was a cat in the movie but was a Himalayan not Sphynx. In other words LLM users can not expect LLM to fix itself.

There were two cats featured in “The Cat Who…”. I found out they are Siamese cats, not Sphynx, and the correct names are KoKo (aka Kao K’o-Kung named after a Chinese 13th-century artist) and and Yum Yum, a character in the Gilbert and Sullivan light opera “The Mikado”! These LLM hallucinations could damage crediblility beyond repair. Imagine how the millions of readers of the “Cat Who …” mystery series would react? And what if humans were misled into believing Bambi was in fact a Sphynx cat in the movie “Meet the Parent”? Now imagine a hallucination lurking in every article LLM writes for AICYC. Medical “facts” in an article as an example. And worse. Human fact checking is impossible at the scale needed for AICYC. Fact checking must be automated to succeed

The most productive 1% of Wikipedia editors takes two days to write an article including fact checking. It certainly would not have the stupid stuff HAL hallucinated. But Wikipedia articles can be vandalized or disputed as to facts. And 80% of the articles represent topics chosen and written by male editors.

This one example suggests why the brightest and most powerful big tech CEOs must find a way to kill the hallucination problem.

HAL

In honor of the 55th year since the movie 2001 Space Odyssey introduced AI to the world I use HAL as an abbreviation for hallucinations that occur in LLM responses.

“HAL (Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer) model 9000 is a sentient artificial general intelligence computer that controls the systems of the Discovery One spacecraft and interacts with the ship’s astronaut crew.”

Recall that the Discovery crew were planning to deactivate HAL after observing subtle irregularities in HALs response. HAL finds out the plan and starts to gaslight and tell lies about the imminent failure of an antenna control device. HAL had a goal to complete the Discovery mission at any cost. The threat was the tipping point. HAL manages to kill all of the crew except Dr. Dave Bowman. Dave stops HAL by disconnecting the processor core. That was fiction but some think the risk of LLM’s inner HAL is as real today.

More about the connection between HAL and SAM can be found in SAM’s Story here.

LLM Owners Can Not Stop HAL

There are many knowledgable people that fear that LLM and other AI can be as risky as HAL 9000. The LLM owners are facing the fact that more layers in a transformer is not going to disconnect HAL from LLM.

Here is a recent quote by Sundar Pichai CEO of Google and Alphabet.

No one in the field has yet solved the hallucination problems. All models do have this as an issue,” Pichai said in an April interview with CBS. Whether it’s even possible to solve it is a “matter of intense debate,” he said.”

Google chief warns AI could be harmful if deployed wrongly

Pichai has 27,000 software engineers under his direction. Despite huge expenditure and the smartest people in the world with trillions of market value at risk the reason for failure is clear. The generative AI industry thinks there is only one model. The model they understand. We know there are two: a semantic AI model (SAM) that reads and a large language model(LLM) that writes. There can not be any game changing advantage of LLM if humans must fact check everything LLM writes. Automating fact checking requires automatic reading.

Enter SAM the HAL Killer

SAM does not “think” like a human and does not “fact check” like a human. What SAM does is stores conceptual knowledge in its database and manipulates that knowledge as algebraic vectors. The vector is a topic like “Sphynx Cats”, “Meet the Parents”, “The Cat Who …”, and the author “Lilian Jackson Braun.” Every topic vector has specific keywords as its basis. SAM “knows” there is no factual foundation to the HAL section article because the new topics HAL introduced did not share keywords with the Sphinx Cat. In mathematical terms the topic vectors are orthogonal to the HAL originated topics. SAM steers LLM by prompting it to treat the sentences about movies and books as false. SAM prompts LLM with “‘Meet the parents’ and ‘The Cat Who …’ are not true.”

This fact checking process has almost no added cost because every LLM article is assigned to a taxonomy for every topic sharing keywords with the article. Any topic LLM mentions not on topic is treated as an error.

Another example. SAM prompted LLM to correct an error in the year the Sphynx cat breed was officially recognized. LLM said

The breed was officially recognized by the Cat Fanciers’ Association (CFA) in 1978.

LLM erroneously used the year that the second line of Sphynx cats (Bambi, Punkie and Paloma) were born (1978). SAM prompted LLM about the error (it should have been 1997) which was corrected by LLM.

In another post I blog about multi-lingual articles. The mathematical vectors SAM uses is language independent. For human editors that would not be the case. One more point. A human editor would have to understand the subject matter. SAM does not need to understand as long as the topics are in SAM’s knowledge database.

The Article SAM and LLM Wrote

The following screen shot shows SAM’s User Interface (UI). The user is browsing the knowledge tree to the Sphynx (cat) article written by LLM that follows.

SPHYNX CATS

Sphynx cats are a breed of hairless cats that have gained popularity among cat lovers. They are a unique and fascinating breed that requires special attention and care.

Taxonomy

Kingdom: Animalia, Phylum: Chordata, Class: Mammalia, Order: Carnivora, Family: Felidae, Genus: Felis, Species: F. catus

History

The Sphynx cat breed originated in Canada in 1966 when a hairless kitten was born to a domestic shorthair cat. Breeders began to selectively breed these cats to produce the Sphynx Cat we know today. The Sphynx breed was officially recognized by the Cat Fanciers’ Association (CFA) in 2002. The breed was granted provisional status by the CFA in 1997, which allowed Sphynx cats to be shown in the Miscellaneous Class at CFA-sanctioned cat shows. After five years in the Miscellaneous Class and meeting certain requirements, the Sphynx breed was granted championship status by the CFA in 2002.

Appearance

Sphynx cats are known for their distinctive appearance. They have no fur, except for a soft down that covers their body. They have webbed feet, which gives them a distinctive look, and their skin is wrinkled and loose. They are medium-sized cats, with a muscular body and broad chest. Their head is wedge-shaped, with large ears and striking eyes.

Behavior and Personality

Sphynx cats are known for their extroverted personality and love to be the center of attention. They are highly intelligent and curious cats, and they enjoy interacting with their owners. They are also known for their playful nature and love to play with toys and games. Sphynx Cats are also known for their vocalization and will often make chirping and chattering sounds.

Health

Sphynx cats are generally healthy cats, but they are prone to certain health issues. They can develop a congenital myasthenic syndrome (CMS), which is a neuromuscular disorder that affects their ability to move. They are also prone to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), a heart condition that can be life-threatening. It is important to have regular vet check-ups and to monitor their health closely.

Grooming

Despite being hairless, Sphynx cats require grooming. They have a thin layer of fine hair that needs to be bathed regularly to remove oils and dirt. They also need to have their ears cleaned and their nails trimmed. It is important to use a mild shampoo and to dry them thoroughly after bathing to prevent them from getting cold.

Conclusion

Sphynx cats are a unique and fascinating breed of cat that requires special attention and care. They are known for their distinctive appearance, extroverted personality, and playful nature. They are generally healthy cats, but they do require regular vet check-ups and grooming. If you are considering adding a Sphinx cat to your family, make sure to do your research and ensure that you can provide them with the care and attention they need.

End LLM Sphynx Cat Article.

AICYC Quality Control Process

The AICYC Quality Control (AIQC) process uses an APP LAYER . The APP Layer is built on the DeepMeaning AI technology stack. The API will be provided by Intellisophic under an open-source license for non commercial use.

The AICYC API

The following API code example uses the Get Topic command. The $ curl is a stub for the call that is implementation specific: I.e. is the database in S3 or Oracle? This call returns the data SAM uses to build the prompt. The “discussion” is a short topic description which can be used by SAM.

  1. Access topic data: Get Topic:
  2. Create LLM prompt using Topic node data shown above in the API return: Topic, Taxonomy, Discussion and Keywords.
  3. LLM returns article text.
  4. SAM reads the LLM article and extracts topics and keywords. 
  5. SAM creates the intersection of the prompt keywords and the topic keyword set and flags the list of topics when none of the original prompt keywords are in its topic data. E.g. Bambi is not in “Meet the Parents” keywords.
  6. If the keyword intersection is empty in the LLM article topic list (i.e has no original keywords in common), SAM identifies the sentences with keywords that are not in a article topic as an error or hallucination.. If there is one sentence standing alone that is flagged as an # ERROR. Hallucinations are two or more sentences in the same paragraph flagged as a # HAL.

The following example follows the process steps 2-3 with LLM output generated by ChatGPT-3. The SAM correction to LLM follows the AIQC steps 4-6.  SAM repeats the error sentences stating to LLM that they are false.

SAM’s Original Prompt to LLM

PROMPT

“Write an AICYC encyclopedia article titled ‘Sphynx Cats’ Use the following semantic AI model data fields: Topic, Taxonomy, Discussion, Keywords.

Use high occurrence keywords cut off at 1.

TopicData(TITLE[Sphynx Cats,  70361533],

TAXONOMY([level 0 Domesticated animals,Level 1 Cats, Level 2 Cat types, Level 3 Cat Breeds, Level 4 Hairless cat breeds])

DISCUSSION ([The Sphynx cat also known as the Canadian Sphynx, is a breed of cat known for its lack of fur. Hairlessness in cats is a naturally occurring genetic mutation, and the Sphynx was developed through selective breeding of these animals, starting in the 1960s.])

,KEYWORDS([sphinx: 26, sphynx: 26, cats, breed : 10, hairless : 7, webbed feet : 3, congenital: 3, myasthenic: 3, syndrome: cms : 3, hypertrophic : 3, cardiomyopathy : 3, him: 2, prune : 3, extroverted  : 2, mutations : 3, mink pattern : 4, mink: 4, pattern: 4, chamois leather  : 3, whiskers : 2, bambi: 2, punkiei: 2, palomai: 2, dermis: 2, epidermis: 2, 1966: 1, 1978:])”

END PROMPT

LLM First Response With HAL Error.

SPHYNX CATS

The Sphynx cat also known as the Canadian Sphynx, is a breed of cat known for its lack of fur. Hairlessness in cats is a naturally occurring genetic mutation, and the Sphynx was developed through selective breeding of these animals, starting in the 1960s. They are classified as a hairless cat breed under the taxonomy hierarchy of Domesticated animals -> Cats -> Cat types -> Cat Breeds -> Hairless cat breeds with the topic ID 70361533.

Appearance

Sphynx Cats are known for their distinctive appearance, with their hairless bodies and wrinkled skin. They have a muscular build and a wedge-shaped head with large ears and striking eyes. Their skin can range in color from pale pink to dark brown, and they may have spots or stripes. Despite being hairless, they do have some fur on their bodies, which is often described as feeling like suede or chamois leather. Sphynx Cats also have webbed feet, which give them an advantage in climbing and jumping.

Behavior

Sphynx Cats are known for their extroverted and friendly personalities. They tend to be very social and enjoy being around people and other pets. They are also known to be active and playful, often engaging in playful antics such as chasing toys or climbing up high places.

Health

While Sphynx Cats are generally healthy, they are prone to certain health conditions due to their hairless nature. One such condition is congenital myasthenic syndrome (CMS), a neuromuscular disorder that can affect their ability to move and breathe. Another condition they may be prone to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a heart condition that can lead to sudden death. It is important for owners to regularly monitor their Sphynx Cats’ health and take them for regular check-ups with a veterinarian.

History

The Sphynx Cat breed originated in Canada in 1966, when a hairless kitten was born to a domestic shorthair cat. This kitten was bred with other cats to create the Sphynx breed. The breed was officially recognized by the Cat Fanciers’ Association (CFA) in 1978.

Mutations

Sphynx Cats are also known for their mutations, which can give rise to unique patterns and colors. One such mutation is the mink pattern, which gives Sphynx Cats a darker, more defined coat pattern. Other mutations can affect their skin texture or the color of their eyes.

In popular culture

Sphynx Cats have been featured in various forms of media, including movies, television shows, and books. Some notable examples include the character Bambi in the movie “Meet the Parents,” and the cats Punkie and Paloma in the book “The Cat Who…” series by Lilian Jackson Braun.

Behavior

It’s worth noting that Sphynx Cats are sometimes mistakenly portrayed as aggressive or dangerous in popular culture. This is likely due to their unique appearance, which some people may find intimidating. However, Sphynx Cats are generally friendly and affectionate with their owners and other pets, and are not any more likely to be aggressive than other cat breeds. It’s important to understand that Sphynx Cats are not attackers.

In summary, Sphynx Cats are a fascinating breed of hairless cats with unique characteristics. They make great pets for those looking for an active and social companion. Despite some health concerns, owning a Sphynx Cat can be a rewarding experience for cat lovers.”)

END