Evaluating ChatGPT as a Bullshit Machine

The structure of the paper is as follows: in the first section, we outline how ChatGPT and similar LLMs operate. Next, we consider the view that when they make factual errors, they are lying or hallucinating: that is, deliberately uttering falsehoods, or blamelessly uttering them on the basis of misleading input information. We argue that neither of these ways of thinking are accurate, insofar as both lying and hallucinating require some concern with the truth of their statements, whereas LLM...

 ChatGPT is a bullshit machine

The idea of ChatGPT as a bullshit machine is a helpful one when combined with the distinction between hard and soft bullshit. Reaching again for the example of the dodgy student paper: we’ve all, I take it, marked papers where it was obvious that a dictionary or thesaurus had been deployed with a crushing lack of subtlety; where fifty-dollar words are used not because they’re the best choice, nor even because they serve to obfuscate the truth, but simply because the author wants to convey...

 LLMs are Lossy Compression for the Entire WWW

To grasp the proposed relationship between compression and understanding, imagine that you have a text file containing a million examples of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Although any compression algorithm could reduce the size of this file, the way to achieve the greatest compression ratio would probably be to derive the principles of arithmetic and then write the code for a calculator program. Using a calculator, you could perfectly reconstruct not just the million ex...