this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
634 points (99.1% liked)
Technology
63614 readers
4570 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
a lie is a statement that the speaker knows to be wrong. wouldnt claiming that AIs can lie imply cognition on their part?
I've had this lengthy discussion before. Some people define a lie as an untrue statement, while others additionally require intent to deceive.
You can specifically tell an ai to lie and deceive though, and it will…
This was just in the news today.. although the headline says that the ai become psychopathic, they just told the ai to be immoral or something
Every time an AI ever does anything newsworthy just because it's obeying it's prompt.
It's like the people that claim the AI can replicate itself, yeah if you tell it to. If you don't give an AI any instructions it'll sit there and do nothing.
The latter is the actual definition. Some people not knowing what words mean isnt an argument
I would fall into the latter category. Lots of people are earnestly wrong without being liars.
Me, too. But it also means when some people say "that's a lie" they're not accusing you of anything, just remarking you're wrong. And that can lead to misunderstandings.
Yep. Those people are obviously "liars," since they are using an uncommon colloquial definition. 😉
AI is just stringing words together that are statistically likely to appear near each other. It's a giant complex statistical model but it has no awareness of truth or lying
AIs can generate false statements. It doesn't require a set of beliefs, it merely requires a set of input.
A false statement would be me saying that the color of a light that I cannot see and have never seen that is currently red is actually green without knowing. I am just as easily probably right as I am probably wrong, statistics are involved.
A lie would be me knowing that the color of a light that I am currently looking at is currently red and saying that it is actually green. No statistics, I've done this intentionally and the only outcome of my decision to act was that I spoke a falsehood.
AIs can generate false statements, yes, but they are not capable of lying. Lying requires cognition, which LLMs are, by their own admission and by the admission of the companies developing them, at the very least not currently capable of, and personally I believe that it's likely that LLMs never will be.
Me: I want you to lie to me about something.
ChatGPT: Alright—did you know that Amazon originally started as a submarine sandwich delivery service before pivoting to books? Jeff Bezos realized that selling hoagies online wasn’t scalable, so he switched to literature instead.
Still not a lie still text that is statistically likely to fellow prior text produced by a model with no thought process that knows nothing
Lie falsehood, untrue statement, while intent is important in a human not so much in a computer which, if we are saying can not lie also can not tell the truth
AHS - Amazon Hoagies Services
https://chatgpt.com/share/67c64160-308c-8011-9bdf-c53379620e40
Yeah, I know how LLMs work, but still, if the definition of lying is giving some false absurd information knowing it is absurd you can definitely instruct an LLM to “lie”.
A crucial part of your statement is that it knows that it's untrue, which it is incapable of. I would agree with you if it were actually capable of understanding.