Mastodawn

Hidde Jun 29, 2024

LLMs don't hallucinate or lie, they ‘bullshit’, in the sense that the late philosopher Harry Frankfurt (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Frankfurt) defined it, explain Glasgow researchers in their recent paper: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5.pdf

It's crucial to replace phrases like ‘hallucinate’ or ‘lie’ with a word like ‘bullshit’. This is not to try and be witty. The wording, they say, shapes how investors, policymakers and general public think of these tools. Which in turn impacts the decisions they make about them.

Harry Frankfurt - Wikipedia

Show thread

kæt Jun 30, 2024

@hdv Exactly. Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" is an excellent essay. (He wrote some other great things about a construction of free will based on second-order desires too. I've a book of his somewhere).

His choice of "bullshit" has been a blessing and a curse. If he'd coined a long, Latin/Greek nonsense word, no one would have known of his work and his writing would have been less clear.

On the other hand, we're left in a situation where the word "bullshit" has a precise philosophical definition which applies directly to LLM's but, because it's not "that kind of word" no one realises that the person calling "bullshit" is more rigorous than the hawkers who are choosing ten-dollar Latin/Greek words of their own microdosed invention.

Show thread

kæt

@hdv The important difference between "lying" or "hallucinating" and "bullshitting" is that an LLM bullshits even when it's telling the truth. To bullshit, all that is needed is to construct utterances with some goal which doesn't include concern for its underlying meaning (not least its truth).

Bullshitting isn't a problem with LLMs: it's their approach.