> There are plenty of people who cannot admit they don’t know something and will just spout bullshit. We call them “bullshitters”, not “liars.” I agree and thi

> There are plenty of people who cannot admit they don’t know something and will just spout bullshit. We call them “bullshitters”, not “liars.” I agree and think there probably is a missing term in our language for the phenomenon we are observing, but it feels like splitting hairs to say the LLM is merely bulshitting and not lying. For the average person dealing with ChatGPT this distinction won't matter, and saying ChatGPT sometimes "lies" more clearly communicates the possible negative downside of its answer than saying it sometimes "bullshits" (especially for low literacy or non-native speakers). I mean, isn't bullshitting still a kind of lie? It's an implicit lie that one is qualified and intends to speak the truth. Certainly it is a kind of deception about one's qualifications, even if that is self-deception. It seems like we are just arguing about shades of gray when it's unclear why that matters.