leastfixedpoint

Tony's Link Log

96 links in 40 categories.

ChatGPT is bullshit.

Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries, Joe Slater (8 June 2024)
đź”— https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
#llm #bcs #nuance #paper #academia

In which it is argued that LLMs, as a category, are “bullshit machines”:

Bullshit. Any utterance produced where a speaker has indifference towards the truth of the utterance.

From the abstract:

[LLMs] have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called “AI hallucinations”. We argue that these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs.