> My former colleague Rebecca Parsons, has been saying for a long time that hallucinations aren’t a bug of LLMs, they are a feature. Indeed they are the feature. All an LLM does is produce hallucinations, it’s just that we find some of them useful.
What a great way of framing it. I've been trying to explain this to people, but this is a succinct version of what I was stumbling to convey.
This is the general idea of the Tangle newsletter [1]. They pick a topic from the news and provide "What the Right is saying" and "What the Left is saying" about the topic.
A group of coworker friends and I used to find the most creative ways to mess with each others' computers if they were left unattended. Some of the ones I can remember off the top of my head:
1. A Chrome extension that slowly rotated every <div> on the page (think 1 degree every 10 minutes). Would be hard to notice unless a page had been left open for a while.
2. Another Chrome extension that would redirect to a full-screen gif of John Cena that would only load after a random number of page loads.
3. A horn sound that would play after every successful git commit, regardless of computer volume.
4. A Slack bot that would scrape another coworker's insufferable Reddit comments, store them in a database, and then use ML to interject the comments into our conversations based on some basic NLP. This one was my favorite.
Just listened to the Search Engine podcast episode [1] where the author talked about this story. It's wild. The author (Joseph Cox) is also a founder of 404 Media[2], which is a great tech blog.