[CJefferson]

Based on reading bad AI generated student essays it’s worse than that, LLMs are happy to “fill in the blanks” with whatever made up fact would make their argument look best.

Most people can’t lie that smoothly, and most readers don’t check carefully, unless they are already an expert in the area.

Any kind of maths proof is particularly bad, they will look convincing and clear until you read them very carefully and see all the holes.

[smeej]

It's funny you mention this, because my father operates exactly as you describe the LLMs, making facts up on the spot, lying smoothly and keeping track of the lies...

...and he's built his whole career in sales because of it.

He despises the existence of Google, because the last thing a pathological bullshitter wants is fact-checking in pockets!

It's taken me nearly 40 years to understand that anchoring statements in reality is just a completely meaningless endeavor for him. He does not care what is true. He cares only what is convincing.

I've been wondering for about a year now why I feel like I can tell LLM work from human work so much more easily than most people, when the only "tell" I can put my finger on is, "The hair stands up on the back of my neck," but this explains ALL of it.

[Llamamoe]

I feel like a good half of humanity operates this way, with it being far more prevalent in boomers than younger generations. It doesn't matter what is backed by evidence to them, instead they rely on anecdotes and persuasive quips and factoids. Having a friend who claims to have experienced X and listing off several other anecdotes means more to them than any amount of evidence.

[smeej]

The truly scary thing to me is watching them start to believe the anecdotes they've stolen from people and presented as their own stories actually did happen to them, as they lose their marbles.

I've spent much of my life learning to tell when people are making things up, but telling when they genuinely believe something that's completely wrong is a very different skill.

It's especially frustrating when they change the narrative of a real story about something where there were multiple witnesses (e.g., my mom and my siblings), then come to believe the narrative, and then accuse us of conspiring to gaslight them.

On the one hand, I get why that would be disorienting and scary, to have a whole group of people telling you you're wrong about something you're sure you remember. On the other hand...karma?

[MattGaiser]

In his line of work, it doesn't matter what is true.

[AlexCoventry]

It depends on the AI. ChatGPT's higher models (o1-pro/o3/o4-mini-high) have some kind of limited capability to detect errors in the user's thinking, and have relatively few hallucinations.

[energy123]

o3 have twice the hallucinations of o1 according to their own hallucination benchmark

[UltraSane]

I've had fun debates about things like p-zombies with Gemini 2.5 Pro