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by mjburgess
377 days ago
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The LLM has no relevant capacities, either to tell the truth or to lie. In generates "appropriate" text, given a history of cases of appropriate textual structures. It is the person who reads this text as-if written by a person who imparts these capacities to the machine, who treats the text as meaningful. But almost no text the LLM generates could be said to be meaningful, if any. In the sense that if a two year old were taught to say, "the magnitude of the charge on the electron is the same as the charge on the proton", one would not suppose the two year old meant what was said. Since the LLM has no interior representational model of the world, only a surface of text tokens laid out as-if it did, its generation of text never comes into direct contact with a system of understanding that text. Therefore the LLM has no capacities ever implied by its use of language, it only appears to. This appearance may be good enough for some use cases, but as an appearance, it's highly fragile. |
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I would argue, that if the output of the LLM is to be interpreted as natural speech, and the output makes an authoritative statement, which is factually incorrect, but stated as if it were true, this is a lie.
The problem is that the tech is presented as if it did have the internal state, that you accurately describe it not having.
The lie in this example, is when it is prompted to describe the process by which it reached a result, and that description has no resemblance to the actual process by which it reached the result.
This isn't a misrepresentation of some external facts, but a complete fabrication, that does not represent how it reached that result, at all.
However many users will accept this information, since it only involves internal aspects of the tool itself.
The fact that the LLM doesn't have this introspective information, is part of exactly why LLMs are NOT intelligence, artificial or otherwise.
And yet they are being presented as such, also, a lie...