this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
168 points (90.8% liked)

Technology

33582 readers
254 users here now

This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.


Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.


Rules:

1: All Lemmy rules apply

2: Do not post low effort posts

3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff

4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.

5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)

6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist

7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

It's time to call a spade a spade. ChatGPT isn't just hallucinating. It's a bullshit machine.

From TFA (thanks @mxtiffanyleigh for sharing):

"Bullshit is 'any utterance produced where a speaker has indifference towards the truth of the utterance'. That explanation, in turn, is divided into two "species": hard bullshit, which occurs when there is an agenda to mislead, or soft bullshit, which is uttered without agenda.

"ChatGPT is at minimum a soft bullshitter or a bullshit machine, because if it is not an agent then it can neither hold any attitudes towards truth nor towards deceiving hearers about its (or, perhaps more properly, its users') agenda."

https://futurism.com/the-byte/researchers-ai-chatgpt-hallucinations-terminology

@technology #technology #chatGPT #LLM #LargeLanguageModels

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

I totally agree that both seem to imply intent, but IMHO hallucinating is something that seems to imply not only more agency than an LLM has, but also less culpability. Like, "Aw, it's sick and hallucinating, otherwise it would tell us the truth."

Whereas calling it a bullshit machine still implies more intentionality than an LLM is capable of, but at least skews the perception of that intention more in the direction of "It's making stuff up" which seems closer to the mechanisms behind an LLM to me.

I also love that the researchers actually took the time to not only provide the technical definition of bullshit, but also sub-categorized it too, lol.