Spent a weekend trying to get a local LLM to stop hallucinating city names.

It kept inventing a place called 'Veridale' for every single query. Anyone know a good way to ground these things in real geography?

3 comments

3 Comments

caseyclark1mo ago

Dozens of bus routes to 'Veridale' scheduled for next Thursday" man, that hits close to home. I once spent a whole day trying to get a travel bot to stop recommending a hotel in a fictional beach town called "Brightwater." It even had fake photos and reviews. Now my phone's convinced there's a hiking trail through a mountain that doesn't exist near me. I'm not sure if it's bad training data or the AI is just pulling a prank on us. Either way, I'm ready for the day my GPS tells me to turn left into a lake.

mitchell.daniel3mo ago

Ugh this is EVERYWHERE now. My GPS tried to route me through a park that doesn't exist last week. My smart speaker invented a whole news story about a flood in a made-up town. It's like the digital world is slowly peeling away from the real one, and we're just supposed to go along with it. Feels like we're all beta testing for a reality that's getting less accurate by the day.

wood.zara3mo ago

Mitchell.daniel makes a good point about how this stuff spreads beyond just code. When your GPS starts making up parks, where does it stop? Do you think the problem is bad training data, or something deeper about how these systems learn to fill in gaps? Feels like we're patching holes in a boat that keeps making new ones.