this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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It doesn't "lie" though, it just generates a plausible sequence of words. The sort-of fortunate thing is that facts are often plausible, and it's going to be trained on a lot of facts. But, facts aren't the only word-sequences that are plausible, and LLMs are trained to be creative, and that means sometimes choosing a next-word that isn't the best fit, which might end up meaning the generated sentence isn't factual.
Calling it a "lie" suggests that it knows the truth, or that it is being deceptive. But, that's giving "spicy autocomplete" too much credit. It simply generates word salads that may or may not contain truths.
The industry word for it is "hallucination", but I'm not sure that fits either.
It's better than lying, but it still implies consciousness. It also implies that it's doing something different than what it normally does.
In reality, it's always just generating plausible words.
It's bullshitting... Faking it till it makes it, if you will.
No, that implies a goal. It's just spicy autocomplete.
It is certainly more complex than a predictive text machine. It does seem to understand the concept of objective truth, and facts, vs interpretation and inaccurate information. It never intentionally provides false information, but sometimes it thinks it is giving factual information when really it is using an abundance of inaccurate information that it was trained with. I'm honestly surprised at how accurate it usually is, considering it was trained with public data from places like Reddit, where common inaccuracies have reached the level of folklore.
No, it literally isn't. That's literally all it is.
Because people are easily fooled, but what it seems like isn't what's actually happening.
It's incapable of thinking. All it does is generate a plausible sequence of words.