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

@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.

@chiffchaff yeah it'd be interesting to know what would have happened had he chosen a different phrase… there's definitely many other books/papers that do that though. It's a shame folks don't study LLMs through an epistemological lense, but through more of a commercial or marketing lense