If I don't believe I know something, and I pretend to know it, the untrue statement is implicit: I'm stating that I have information that I don't have.

For example, I have heard that there's a town called "Springfield" in every state, but I've never done any research to verify that. If I confidently say, "There's a town called 'Springfield' in every state," that's a lie, even if there IS a town called 'Springfield' in every state. The deception isn't the geographical information, it's the implicit statement that I know this geographical information when I don't.

> It's sad that people are so willing to conflate lying with being wrong to push a narrative.

I'm not conflating those things. I think you'll find that what I'm describing fits the definitions you've given, and I think I've made it very clear that I do understand that intent is a necessary component of lying.

The problem is that any word that ascribes agency to the LLM will technically be incorrect. But that removes most possible descriptions of its tone and style which are a relevant part of its response.

An analogy would be if ChatGPT started insulting me and calling my question stupid. Would it be wrong to call its response "rude" or "mean" just because it is statistically regurgitating text that matches some input parameters? This seems unreasonable if our goal is to capture the gist of its response.

This is why people judge it to be "lying" rather than being merely incorrect: it is responding with a certain conversational tone in a certain context that gives its answer a style of arrogance, deceitfulness, and narcissism (because I guess that's what internet comment boards are filled with). "Lying" is a description of the totality of its response--including tone and style--not just the truth value of the answer.

If we are to be really pedantic, the LLM isn't even correct or incorrect ;it is just completing strings of tokens. Humans are imputing their own judgment about what those tokens mean--same as with tone and style. Imputing tone isn't so different from imputing truth value.

It’s important because of motive. A lie is told with intent to conceal a known truth. It’s not just LLM agency that’s in question, it’s human malice.

Co-opting the term “lie” is a rhetorical tool used to shift the conversation from “this person/LLM is saying things that aren’t true” to “this person/LLM is acting maliciously and needs to be punished/sanctioned”

All I want is an honest conversation. It’s more than a little ironic that many humans are themselves being less than honest (and sometimes just bullshitting!) about the context when LLMs produce false statements.

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.

> It’s important because of motive. A lie is told with intent to conceal a known truth. It’s not just LLM agency that’s in question, it’s human malice.

That is not a distinction that matters to me with humans or AI. "Bullshitting" is just a specific form of lying. "Lying" doesn't imply malice to me. But a lack of malice is fairly irrelevant: mostly when people say they didn't intend any harm by lying, it's true, but it's just a way to minimize the fact that they lied. Intent is not as important as you seem to think it is: intent has little to do with how much harm is caused by a lie.

Intent is particularly irrelevant with AI, because AI doesn't have intent. Contrary to your statement, LLM agency isn't in question: we know AI does not have agency.

> Co-opting the term “lie” is a rhetorical tool used to shift the conversation from “this person/LLM is saying things that aren’t true” to “this person/LLM is acting maliciously and needs to be punished/sanctioned”

That's a pretty big leap. I'm not saying that AI should be punished or sanctioned. In fact, I'm not even sure what it would mean to "punish" something that can't experience suffering. What I want isn't to punish/sanction AI, what I want is for people to not trust AI.