this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
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Jesus Christ, y'all. It's like Boomers trying to figure out the internet all over again. Just because AI (probably) can't lie doesn't mean it can't be earnestly wrong. It's not some magical fact machine; it's fancy predictive text.
It will be a truly scary time if people like Ramirez become judges one day and have forgotten how or why it's important to check people's sources yourself, robot or not.
AI, specifically Laege language Models, do not “lie” or tell “the truth”. They are statistical models and work out, based on the prompt you feed them, what a reasonable sounding response would be.
This is why they’re uncreative and they “hallucinate”. It’s not thinking about your question and answering it, it’s calculating what words will placate you, using a calculation that runs on a computer the size of AWS.
It's like when you're having a conversation on autopilot.
"Mum, can I play with my frisbee?" Sure, honey. "Mum, can I have an ice cream from the fridge?" Sure can. "Mum, can I invade Poland?" Absolutely, whatever you want.
So chat gpt started ww2
Don't need something the size of AWS these days. I ran one on my PC last week. But yeah, you're right otherwise.
AI can absolutely lie
a lie is a statement that the speaker knows to be wrong. wouldnt claiming that AIs can lie imply cognition on their part?
I've had this lengthy discussion before. Some people define a lie as an untrue statement, while others additionally require intent to deceive.
I would fall into the latter category. Lots of people are earnestly wrong without being liars.
Me, too. But it also means when some people say "that's a lie" they're not accusing you of anything, just remarking you're wrong. And that can lead to misunderstandings.
Yep. Those people are obviously "liars," since they are using an uncommon colloquial definition. 😉
The latter is the actual definition. Some people not knowing what words mean isnt an argument
Sure it is. You can define language all you want, the goal is to communicate with each other. The definition follows usage, not the other way around. Just look up the current definition for literally...
You can specifically tell an ai to lie and deceive though, and it will…
This was just in the news today.. although the headline says that the ai become psychopathic, they just told the ai to be immoral or something
Every time an AI ever does anything newsworthy just because it's obeying it's prompt.
It's like the people that claim the AI can replicate itself, yeah if you tell it to. If you don't give an AI any instructions it'll sit there and do nothing.
AI is just stringing words together that are statistically likely to appear near each other. It's a giant complex statistical model but it has no awareness of truth or lying
AIs can generate false statements. It doesn't require a set of beliefs, it merely requires a set of input.
A false statement would be me saying that the color of a light that I cannot see and have never seen that is currently red is actually green without knowing. I am just as easily probably right as I am probably wrong, statistics are involved.
A lie would be me knowing that the color of a light that I am currently looking at is currently red and saying that it is actually green. No statistics, I've done this intentionally and the only outcome of my decision to act was that I spoke a falsehood.
AIs can generate false statements, yes, but they are not capable of lying. Lying requires cognition, which LLMs are, by their own admission and by the admission of the companies developing them, at the very least not currently capable of, and personally I believe that it's likely that LLMs never will be.
Me: I want you to lie to me about something.
ChatGPT: Alright—did you know that Amazon originally started as a submarine sandwich delivery service before pivoting to books? Jeff Bezos realized that selling hoagies online wasn’t scalable, so he switched to literature instead.
Still not a lie still text that is statistically likely to fellow prior text produced by a model with no thought process that knows nothing
Lie falsehood, untrue statement, while intent is important in a human not so much in a computer which, if we are saying can not lie also can not tell the truth
AHS - Amazon Hoagies Services
https://chatgpt.com/share/67c64160-308c-8011-9bdf-c53379620e40
Yeah, I know how LLMs work, but still, if the definition of lying is giving some false absurd information knowing it is absurd you can definitely instruct an LLM to “lie”.
A crucial part of your statement is that it knows that it's untrue, which it is incapable of. I would agree with you if it were actually capable of understanding.
Yeah lol, and it's trivial to show
It can and will lie. It has admitted to doing so after I probed it long enough about the things it was telling me.
Lying requires intent. Currently popular LLMs build responses one token at a time—when it starts writing a sentence, it doesn't know how it will end, and therefore can't have an opinion about the truth value of it. (I'd go further and claim it can't really "have an opinion" about anything, but even if it can, it can neither lie nor tell the truth on purpose.) It can consider its own output (and therefore potentially have an opinion about whether it is true or false) only after it has been generated, when generating the next token.
"Admitting" that it's lying only proves that it has been exposed to "admission" as a pattern in its training data.
I strongly worry that humans really weren't ready for this "good enough" product to be their first "real" interaction with what can easily pass as an AGI without near-philosophical knowledge of the difference between an AGI and an LLM.
It's obscenely hard to keep the fact that it is a very good pattern-matching auto-correct in mind when you're several comments deep into a genuinely actually no lie completely pointless debate against spooky math.
You can't ask it about itself because it has no internal model of self and is just basing any answer on data in its training set
You don't need any knowledge of computers to understand how big of a deal it would be if we actually built a reliable fact machine. For me the only possible explanation is to not care enough to try and think about it for a second.
That's fundamentally impossible. There's always some baseline you trust that decides what is true
We did, a long time ago. It's called an encyclopedia.
If humans can't be trusted to only provide facts, how can we be trusted to make a machine that only provides facts? How do we deal with disputed truths? Grey areas?
We actually did. Trouble being you need experts to feed and update the thing, which works when you're watching dams (that doesn't need to be updated) but fails in e.g. medicine. But during the brief time where those systems were up to date they did some astonishing stuff, they were plugged into the diagnosis loop and would suggest additional tests to doctors, countering organisational blindness. Law is an even more complex matter though because applying it requires an unbounded amount of real-world and not just expert knowledge, so forget it.