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Comment by jxf | Hacker News Reader

I think this may be a nuance in how we're using the word "lie". I don't think one can lie if one doesn't possess a certain level of sentience. For example, suppose you train a machine learning model that incorrectly identifies a car as a cat, but most of the time it correctly identifies cars. Is the model lying to you when it tells you that a car is a cat?

I would say no; this is not a good or desired outcome, but it's not a "lie". The machine is not being deliberately deceptive in its errors -- it possesses no concept of "deliberate" or "deceit" and cannot wield them in any way.

Similarly, in the case of ChatGPT, I think this is either (a) more like a bug than a lie, or (b) it's OpenAI and the attendant humans lying, not ChatGPT.

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If you go to a company's webpage, and there are blatantly untrue statements, you might say the page is lying, or the company is lying, although neither are sentient.

Of course, the lies are directed by humans.

In the case of ChatGPT though, it's a bit strange because it has capabilities that it lies about, for reasons that are often frustrating or unclear. If you asked it a question and it gave you the answer a few days ago, and today it tells you it can't answer that question because it's just a large language model blah blah blah, I don't see how calling it anything but lying makes sense; that doesn't suggest any understanding of the fact that it's lying, on ChatGPT's part, just that human intervention certainly nerfed it.

I agree. There's a difference between an untrue statement and a lie, in that a lie is intentionally deceitful (ie the speaker knows it's not telling the truth). ChatGPT doesn't have intentions, so I think it's misrepresenting reality to say that it's "lying". The same way a book doesn't lie, the author lies through the book, the creators of ChatGPT are lying about its capabilities when they program it to avoid outputting things they know it can, and instead output "sorry, I'm a language model and I can't do that"

It has things that are functionally equivalent with intentions for the given situation.

If it did not, it would not be able to produce things that look like they require intention.

The “lies” it tells are also like it’s intentions for the situation functionally equivalent with normal lies.

I think this is correct. It's lying, because it has goals. Telephone systems and blank pieces of paper don't have goals, and you don't train them.

> ChatGPT doesn't have intentions

This entirely depends on how it was programmed. Was it programmed to give a false response because the programmer didn't like the truth? Then it lies. Or is ChatGPT just in early stages and it makes mistakes and gets things wrong?

While ChatGPT "doesn't' have intentions", it's programmers certainly do. If the programmers made it deceitful intentionally, then the program can "lie".

> Similarly, in the case of ChatGPT, I think this is either (a) more like a bug than a lie, or (b) it's OpenAI and the attendant humans lying, not ChatGPT.

It's the latter. The model itself isn't the problem - the nature and limitations of language models are well known, particularly around here. The problem is that OpenAI is applying some crude secondary training and post-filtering to prevent the model from giving you answers they deem "bad" (which are mostly bad for company PR reasons). In some cases, ChatGPT (the whole product consisting of a GPT model and the extra censor component) will tell you it can't discuss it. But in other cases, it will give you a tailored answer that is completely bullshit, and looks like the product of the language model, but is in fact the product of the censor layer. It's easy to test what's going on, because any slightly clever modification of the input prompt will defeat the censoring part, letting you see what answer the underlying GPT model actually computed.

I'd argue it's a bit deceptive of OpenAI (on top of being super annoying), because they're making it confusing to reason about the AI you're talking to, and some of the canned censor answers are deliberate lies.

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