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Judges Are Fed up With Lawyers Using AI That Hallucinate Court Cases
(www.404media.co)
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this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
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Jesus Christ, y'all. It's like Boomers trying to figure out the internet all over again. Just because AI (probably) can't lie doesn't mean it can't be earnestly wrong. It's not some magical fact machine; it's fancy predictive text.
It will be a truly scary time if people like Ramirez become judges one day and have forgotten how or why it's important to check people's sources yourself, robot or not.
AI, specifically Laege language Models, do not “lie” or tell “the truth”. They are statistical models and work out, based on the prompt you feed them, what a reasonable sounding response would be.
This is why they’re uncreative and they “hallucinate”. It’s not thinking about your question and answering it, it’s calculating what words will placate you, using a calculation that runs on a computer the size of AWS.
It's like when you're having a conversation on autopilot.
"Mum, can I play with my frisbee?" Sure, honey. "Mum, can I have an ice cream from the fridge?" Sure can. "Mum, can I invade Poland?" Absolutely, whatever you want.
So chat gpt started ww2
Don't need something the size of AWS these days. I ran one on my PC last week. But yeah, you're right otherwise.
No probably about it, it definitely can't lie. Lying requires knowledge and intent, and GPTs are just text generators that have neither.
A bit out of context my you recall me of some thinking I heard recently about lying vs. bullshitting.
Lying, as you said, requires quite a lot of energy : you need an idea of what the truth is and you engage yourself in a long-term struggle to maintain your lie and keep it coherent as the world goes on.
Bullshit on the other hand is much more accessible : you just have to say things and never look back on them. It's very easy to pile a ton of them and it's much harder to attack you about any of them because they're much less consequent.
So in that view, a bullshitter doesn't give any shit about the truth, while a liar is a bit more "noble". 0
I think the important point is that LLMs as we understand them do not have intent. They are fantastic at providing output that appears to meet the requirements set in the input text, and when they actually do meet those requirements instead of just seeming to they can provide genuinely helpful info and also it's very easy to not immediately know the difference between output that looks correct and satisfies the purpose of an LLM vs actually being correct and satisfying the purpose of the user.
So it can not tell the truth either
not really no. They are statistical models that use heuristics to output what is most likely to follow the input you give it
They are in essence mimicking their training data
So I think this whole thing about whether it can lie or not is just semantics then no?
everything is semantics.
Lying is telling a falsehood intentionally
LLM's clearly lack the prerequisite intentionality
They can’t have intent, no?
The llm is incapable of having intent because it’s just programming
precisely, which is why they cannot lie, just respond with no real grasp of wether what they output is truth or falsehoods.
AI can absolutely lie
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.
E: you can stop arguing about definitions and logic. The fact remains that some people will refer to untrue statements as lies, no matter what the dictionary says.
It can't just be the first statement, as that would preclude lies of omission.
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. 😉
The latter is the actual definition. Some people not knowing what words mean isnt an argument
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.
It can and will lie. It has admitted to doing so after I probed it long enough about the things it was telling me.
Lying requires intent. Currently popular LLMs build responses one token at a time—when it starts writing a sentence, it doesn't know how it will end, and therefore can't have an opinion about the truth value of it. (I'd go further and claim it can't really "have an opinion" about anything, but even if it can, it can neither lie nor tell the truth on purpose.) It can consider its own output (and therefore potentially have an opinion about whether it is true or false) only after it has been generated, when generating the next token.
"Admitting" that it's lying only proves that it has been exposed to "admission" as a pattern in its training data.
I strongly worry that humans really weren't ready for this "good enough" product to be their first "real" interaction with what can easily pass as an AGI without near-philosophical knowledge of the difference between an AGI and an LLM.
It's obscenely hard to keep the fact that it is a very good pattern-matching auto-correct in mind when you're several comments deep into a genuinely actually no lie completely pointless debate against spooky math.
It knows the answer its giving you is wrong, and it will even say as much. I'd consider that intent.
It is incapable of knowledge, it is math, what it says is determined by what is fed into it. If it admits to lying, it was trained on texts that admit to lying and the math says that it is most likely that it should apologize using the following tokenized responses with the following weights to probabilities etc.
It apologizes because math says that the most likely response is to apologize.
Edit: you can just ask it y'all
https://chatgpt.com/share/67c64160-308c-8011-9bdf-c53379620e40
Please take a strand of my hair and split it with pointless philosophical semantics.
Our brains are chemical and electric, which is physics, which is math.
/think
Therefor, I am a product (being) of my environment (locale), experience (input), and nurturing (programming).
/think.
What's the difference?
Your statistical model is much more optimized and complex, and reacts to your environment and body chemistry and has been tuned over billions of years of “training” via evolution.
Large language models are primitive, rigid, simplistic, and ultimately expensive.
Plus LLMs, image/music synths, are all trained on stolen data and meant to replace humans; so extra fuck those.
Ask chatgpt, I'm done arguing effective consciousness vs actual consciousness.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67c64160-308c-8011-9bdf-c53379620e40
Technically it's not, because the LLM doesn't decide to do anything, it just generates an answer based on a mixture of the input and the training data, plus some randomness.
That said, I think it makes sense to say that it is lying if it can convince the user that it is lying through the text it generates.
Its actually been proven that AI can and will lie. When given a ability to cheat a task and the instructions not to use it. It will use the tool and fully deny doing so.
Edit:
Not sure why the downvotes because when i say proven i mean the research has been done and the results have been known for while
https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.12831
I don't know if I would call it lying per-se, but yes I have seen instances of AI's being told not to use a specific tool and them using them anyways, Neuro-sama comes to mind. I think in those cases it is mostly the front end agreeing not to lie (as that is what it determines the operator would want to hear) but having no means to actually control the other functions going on.