[vineyardmike]

If I make a claim based on prior knowledge and statistics I’ve learned over time, it’s not lying if it’s wrong. Lying has intent. Plenty of people say incorrect facts that they think are correct.

In second grade, my cousin talked a lot about flax farmers in South America, after learning about them in class. Turns out the lesson was on quinoa farmers, and he forgot the original produce and “hallucinated” the statistics about flax farmers instead. Technically the term is confabulation. Was he lying? No because he wasn’t trying to tell us fake facts.

LLMs have no intention of being wrong. Their “hallucinations” or whatever are just whatever makes sense from their statistical models. They’re really just confabulations.

[majormajor]

"Bullshitting" seems like a good term for accurate or inaccurate responses.

Let's extend "LLMs have no intention of being wrong" to "LLMs have no inherent sense of being correct" - sometimes their predictions happen to be correct, sometimes they don't. But they're all hallucinations generated from the same process.

[visarga]

Bullshitting always requires a hidden intention to manipulate.

[majormajor]

Nah, it can be just talking without much rigor or verification of fact or anything, often with a loose boundary between opinion and fact - the "to talk in an exaggerated or foolish manner" definition.

As in "my buddies and I were bullshitting about movies the other day."

ChatGPT definitely talks with an exaggerated manner confidence-wise.

[uoaei]

Mislead is probably a more accurate term. Bullshit exists outside of the correct/incorrect binary and serves only to build narrative.