pabs3The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess
https://aphyr.com/posts/411-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess
Some people point at LLMs confabulating, as if this wasn’t something humans are already widely known for doing.
I consider it highly plausible that confabulation is inherent to scaling intelligence. In order to run computation on data that due to dimensionality is computationally infeasible, you will most likely need to create a lower dimensional representation and do the computation on that. Collapsing the dimensionality is going to be lossy, which means it will have gaps between what it thinks is the reality and what is.
Yes, and to me the evolution of life sure looks like an evolution of more truthful models of the universe in service of energy profit. Better model -> better predictions -> better profit.
I'm extremely skeptical that all of life evolved intelligence to be closer to truth only for us to digitize intelligence and then have the opposite happen. Makes no sense.
My understanding is that this is the opposite of what is typically understood to be true - organisms with less truthful (more reductive/compressed) perception survive better than those with more complete perception. "Fitness beats truth."
And is that considered a feature of humans or a bug?
Is it something we want to emulate?
The suggestion is that it is an intrinsic quality and therefore neither a feature nor a bug.
It's like saying, computation requires nonzero energy. Is that a feature or a bug? Neither, it's irrelevant, because it's a physical constant of the universe that computation will always require nonzero energy.
If confabulation is a physical constant of intelligence, then like energy per computation, all we can do is try to minimize it, while knowing it can never go to zero.
> Some people point at LLMs confabulating
No. LLMs do not confabulate they bullshit. There is a big difference. AIs do not care, cannot care, have not capacity to care about the output. String tokens in, string tokes out. Even if they have all the data perfectly recorded they will still fail to use it for a coherent output.
> Collapsing the dimensionality is going to be lossy, which means it will have gaps between what it thinks is the reality and what is.
Confabulation has to do with degradation of biological processes and information storage.
There is no equivalent in a LLM. Once the data is recorded it will be recalled exactly the same up to the bit. A LLM representation is immutable. You can download a model a 1000 times, run it for 10 years, etc. and the data is the same. The closes that you get is if you store the data in a faulty disk, but that is not why LLMs output is so awful, that would be a trivial problem to solve with current technology. (Like having a RAID and a few checksums).
You seem confident. Can you get it to bullshit on GPT-5.4 thinking? Use a text prompt spanning 3-4 pages and lets see if it gets it wrong.
I haven't seen any counter examples, so you may give some examples to start with.
> No. LLMs do not confabulate they bullshit. There is a big difference. AIs do not care, cannot care, have not capacity to care about the output. String tokens in, string tokes out. Even if they have all the data perfectly recorded they will still fail to use it for a coherent output.
Isn't "caring" a necessary pre-requisite for bullshitting? One either bullshits because they care, or don't care, about the context.
They're presumably referring to the Harry Frankfurt definition of bullshit: "speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care whether what they say is true or false."
I don't even think they bullshit, since that requires conscious effort that they do not an cannot possess. They just simply interpret things incorrectly sometimes, like any of us meatbags.
Humans can be reasoned with, though, and are capable of learning.