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Show HN: Are You in the Weights?
Read the full article on intheweights.com ↗340
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The 5-second version
- Users find LLMs sometimes generate accurate information about real namesakes with similar names, not just hallucinations.
- Hallucinations can range from pure fabrications to conflated identities with real people who share similar names in training data.
- Developers should distinguish between false claims about the user themselves versus accurate claims about different people with the same name.
- LLM "hallucinations" may partially stem from humans in training data confidently inferring incorrect connections between similar names.
- Name-based queries are particularly prone to identity conflation, requiring careful verification when building products around personal lookups.
Top voices
Verbatim comments from the thread's most notable / highest-karma participants.
Yeah, that went about as well as I would have expected. It dug up a bunch of what can only be my information, then made up a bunch of confidently wrong things to say about me. I'm a Software Engineer and SaaS guy, known for running the company "[random word from my blog] Software" and his [different word from my blog] Blog. Founder of three separate startups I've never heard of and may not exist, and well known contributor to Open Source (because that's something that software people often do…Read on HN ↗
zamadatix19.4k karma
GP didn't give enough information to know if this was actually a hallucination or not, let alone what type of hallucination. I.e. it's only a hallucination if no rugby player or surgeon is a John Doe, not if John Doe the GP isn't those things. I wonder how much of hallucinating/"mistakes" in LLMs is because the training data is full of us filling in additional info we humans commonly feel or interpret as implied rather than something which manifests from the architecture of the LLM itself. I as…Read on HN ↗
dvt18.7k karma
I have a unique last name (maybe that's why), but pretty much nailed it: David Titarenco Software engineer and open-source contributor 340 strength · Top 20% GPT-5.5 says Software engineer and writer known for work on developer tools, systems, and programming- related articles. Claude Opus 4.8 says Software engineer and entrepreneur known for web/JavaScript development work and contributions to open-source projects and tech startup communities.Read on HN ↗
georgemcbay15.6k karma
"George McBay" > Llama 3.2 1B says > American actor, best known for his roles in films such as 'The Big Lebowski' and 'The Big Lebowski 2'. Nailed it! /s But even the entries that aren't marked as likely hallucinations are wrong for me on this site. > George McBay > African American chemist and educator No, that's Henry Cecil McBay (no direct relation that I'm aware of). Google Search's AI mode does match actual me, but the information it spits out is all mixed up with information on ano…Read on HN ↗