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.
No probably about it, it definitely can't lie. Lying requires knowledge and intent, and GPTs are just text generators that have neither.
I'm G P T and I cannot lie.
You other brothers use 'AI'
But when you file a case
To the judge's face
And say, "made mistakes? Not I!"
He'll be mad!
🏅
So it can not tell the truth either
not really no. They are statistical models that use heuristics to output what is most likely to follow the input you give it
They are in essence mimicking their training data
A bit out of context my you recall me of some thinking I heard recently about lying vs. bullshitting.
Lying, as you said, requires quite a lot of energy : you need an idea of what the truth is and you engage yourself in a long-term struggle to maintain your lie and keep it coherent as the world goes on.
Bullshit on the other hand is much more accessible : you just have to say things and never look back on them. It's very easy to pile a ton of them and it's much harder to attack you about any of them because they're much less consequent.
So in that view, a bullshitter doesn't give any shit about the truth, while a liar is a bit more "noble". 0
I think the important point is that LLMs as we understand them do not have intent. They are fantastic at providing output that appears to meet the requirements set in the input text, and when they actually do meet those requirements instead of just seeming to they can provide genuinely helpful info and also it's very easy to not immediately know the difference between output that looks correct and satisfies the purpose of an LLM vs actually being correct and satisfying the purpose of the user.
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 never have 100% of people using a word the same if only because some portion of the population is stupid and illiterate and you have both drift over time and geography. So say at a given time of a billion people 99.995% believe the definition is A and 0.005% believe B. Periodically people correct people in B and some of them shift back to the overwhelming majority and sometimes new folks drift into B.
It is clearly at that point, 99.995% A, correct to say that the definition of the word is A and anyone who says B is wrong. This doesn't change if B becomes 10% but it might change if B becomes overwhelmingly dominant in which case it becomes correct. There is constantly small drifts mostly by people simply to stupid to find out what words means. Treating most of these as alternative definitions would be in a word inefficient.
Drift also isn't neutral. For instance using lie to mean anything which is wrong actually deprives the language of a common word to even mean that. It impoverishes the language and makes it harder to express ideas. There is every reason to prefer the correct definition that is also overwhelmingly used.
There are also words which belong to a technical nature which are defined not by usage but a particular discipline. A kidney is a kidney and it would be one if 90% of the dumb people said. Likewise a CPU never referred to the entire tower no matter how many AOL users said so.
This is a long way of saying that just because definition follows usage we should let functionally illiterate people say what they want and treat it as alternative facts.
Feel free to argue with them, I'm just pointing out that there's potential for misunderstandings. If you want to talk about an actual subject, you'll necessarily have to navigate them.
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.