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Comment by jldugger | Hacker News Reader

Because "fabrication" seems worse, if more accurate.

I prefer "confabulation," which describes the analogous human behavior where you have no idea what the objective truth actually is, so you just make up something that sounds right

Fabrication implies malicious intent or at least intentional deception. LLMs don’t have any “intent”.

Their developers have intent. That intent is to give the perception of understanding/facts/logic without designing representations of such a thing, and with full knowledge that as a result, it will be routinely wrong in ways that would convey malicious intent if a human did it. I would say they are trained to deceive because if being correct was important, the developers would have taken an entirely different approach.

generating information without regard to the truth is bullshitting, not necessarily malicious intent.

for example, this is bullshit because it’s words with no real thought behind it: “if being correct was important, the developers would have taken an entirely different approach”

If you are asking a professional high-stakes questions about their expertise in a work context and they are just bullshitting you, it's fair to impugn their motives. Similarly if someone is using their considerable talent to place bullshit artists in positions of liability-free high-stakes decisions.

Your second comment is more flippant than mine, as even AI boosters like Chollet and LeCun have come around to LLMs being tangential to delivering on their dreams, and that's before engaging with formal methods, V&V, and other approaches used in systems that actually value reliability.

In reality, it should sound worse so people don’t trust it so much.

But those who sell AI products don’t want that.

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