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Zeitgeist — a spike by Chris Gathercole
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  2. Simon Willison — Creator of Datasette; co-creator of Django/

Don't classify. Hallucinate!

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  • Simon Willison highlights Doug Turnbull’s “Don’t classify. Hallucinate!” method for tagging content, which addresses the challenge of using LLMs with an excessively large existing tag vocabulary.
  • The core idea is to prompt an LLM to generate novel, imagined tags or classifications (e.g., hierarchical paths like “Furniture / Living Room Furniture / Coffee Tables”) for content, without providing the existing tag list.
  • These “hallucinated” tags are then mapped to the closest concrete tags in the existing corpus using vector embeddings, effectively bypassing token limits and enabling efficient tagging of large, untagged archives.