It’s time to call a spade a spade. ChatGPT isn’t just hallucinating. It’s a bullshit machine.
From TFA (thanks @mxtiffanyleigh for sharing):
"Bullshit is ‘any utterance produced where a speaker has indifference towards the truth of the utterance’. That explanation, in turn, is divided into two “species”: hard bullshit, which occurs when there is an agenda to mislead, or soft bullshit, which is uttered without agenda.
“ChatGPT is at minimum a soft bullshitter or a bullshit machine, because if it is not an agent then it can neither hold any attitudes towards truth nor towards deceiving hearers about its (or, perhaps more properly, its users’) agenda.”
https://futurism.com/the-byte/researchers-ai-chatgpt-hallucinations-terminology
I totally agree that both seem to imply intent, but IMHO hallucinating is something that seems to imply not only more agency than an LLM has, but also less culpability. Like, “Aw, it’s sick and hallucinating, otherwise it would tell us the truth.”
Whereas calling it a bullshit machine still implies more intentionality than an LLM is capable of, but at least skews the perception of that intention more in the direction of “It’s making stuff up” which seems closer to the mechanisms behind an LLM to me.
I also love that the researchers actually took the time to not only provide the technical definition of bullshit, but also sub-categorized it too, lol.