[Joking_Phantom]

I'm not sure if confabulate is exactly what LLMs do (though it seems closer than the implications of hallucinate).

But neurotypical, neurodiverse, perfectly functional people, etc. all confabulate or do something similar on a regular basis, in verbal and written mediums, and often do so in good faith. It's human instinct to communicate, even if you are uncertain and unaware of the full context of the discussion.

Teachers, customer service reps, executives, shop keepers, doctors, nurses, domain experts, authors of textbooks, it doesn't matter who it is, they'll probably confabulate or equivocate or do some other type of communication that isn't immediately useful. Yet it's still a useful activity to just talk to someone or read a less than rigorous book for the purposes of learning (discounting the relationship forming part, which is also useful). And so is using LLMs, even for casual users. So long as they understand that limitation, whether its with a chatbot or a real person. Not everything they say will be useful or truthful, but we are already capable of adjusting to that.

[pcblues]

I'm not sure whether neurofancy people confabulating should be given an honest bill of truth health based on their category.

Sounds like #believeallconfabulators :)

Honest communication is difficult for some people to assess, and not for others. But I think we should learn from any recent #believeall... that we shouldn't base trust ratios on categorisation.

Honest communication is difficult to do, like weight-lifting, and takes a lot of practise to do well.

It also makes your BS meter more finely attuned, so is a good practise.

With that in mind, you will think this is arrogant to say if you lie for a living but not if you regularly tell the truth: Liars lie with liars and lie to rid themselves of truth troubles.

Think about that when you next talk to a chatbot/human confabulator :)

[Joking_Phantom]

I'm not really into Twitter, so I'm guessing there's some drama you are referencing that is topical.

But, I'm not talking about any society wide issue or philosophical treatise about trust and breakdowns in communication. Just talking about day to day interactions, where the stakes are completely different.

Trivial Example: If the sign on a mailbox says "Last pickup 5:00pm," what exactly does that mean? Will it be picked up, processed, and sent out of town that same day? Or just merely picked up, to be processed and sent the next day. This piece of written communication isn't a purely useful truth - it's ambiguous.

Pretend that this is an important behavior to know for your business, like if you were mailing huge checks for some obscure financial process. So you call up the local post office and ask. The worker who picks up the phone might know exactly what you are talking about and helpfully tell you the right answer. Or they might not, and tell you honestly that they don't know. Or they ask their supervisor, transfer you, make something up, tell you it doesn't matter, mail will get where it goes, or that you shouldn't worry about it, it's just mail.

ChatGPT could give you same distribution of answers as that worker did: helpful truth, meaningless equivocation, reassurance, redirection, confabulation, or lie to you. ChatGPT can be just as useful as talking to people in spite of those flaws, because people do the same thing.

This is reliant on the prior assumption that you gracefully handle unreliable communication, and that communication with people is useful. While this might seem a bit farfetched to some people, remember that we have a ready analog in computer science - networking TCP over UDP.