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Comment by usr1106 | Hacker News Reader

Lying is intentional. LLMs have no intention, they are just clueless what is true or false

> Lying is intentional

That's an interesting issue. When Gwyneth Paltrow is making strange statements about efficiency of certain procedures or aspects of human health, a lot of what she says is untrue. However, by your definition, she is not lying as she (most probably...) believes what she says.

Many people are repeating lies in good faith. The fact they believe them doesn't magically make what they say true.

> by your definition

I think that is commonly shared definition. We distinguish lying from just being wrong. Saying untrue things in good faith, as Gwyneth Paltrow in your example, is not lying.

I've just checked what Merriam-Webster says. It seems to accept both meanings but uses inanimate objects for the examples:

> 2

> : to create a false or misleading impression

> Statistics sometimes lie.

> The mirror never lies.

Well, yeah. There's a distinction between lying and being incorrect. I do think the parent is right in that when we accuse someone of lying, we're mostly accusing them of making assertions or statements they don't believe to be true (actually, this means that their lies could actually be factually correct—all that really matters is the the author of the utterance does not actually believe in the truth value of what they are saying)

If someone believes their own bullshit/lies or not, you're just as bad off if you believe them.

Interesting. Of course semantics of natural language is not formally defined.

For me it sounds like lying and telling lies is not necessarily the same thing.

They're certainly trained on intentional lies! That's kind of the point. Models of lies, not models that lie.

The purpose of a system is what it does

which programmatically speaking is very interesting, and yet ultimately just another type of database, in my experience so far, with regards it obsoleti g humanity, as long as you can hold a basic train of thought through a few sentences and distractions without changing the subject or repeating verbatim things you literally just said, and don't consume the energy resources of a small planet then you are mostly fine. As a bit of a programmer it's fascinating to be able to write a yes, no, maybe loop where I hand off ambiguities to the llm for its best guess. human in the loop ftw.

Lying does not require intention

If you say something untrue that you believe is true, are you lying?

> A delusion is a false fixed belief that is not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence.

Another way to think of being delusional is “lying to yourself”…

> If you say something untrue that you believe is true, are you lying?

Personally I’d argue yes. I’m lying to myself and then by proxy to everyone around me.

I could say “I don’t know” instead, but I didn’t.

But that’s just this human’s opinion.

I'm not talking about delusion. I mean the simplest case where you acquired some information, have no reason to believe that it is untrue, and convey that to someone else.

There's no intention to deceive or any possibility for you to know that your information might be untrue.

Yes!

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