alt Hacker News> Some people point at LLMs confabulating
No. LLMs do not confabulate they bullshit. There is a big difference. AIs do not care, cannot care, have not capacity to care about the output. String tokens in, string tokes out. Even if they have all the data perfectly recorded they will still fail to use it for a coherent output.
> Collapsing the dimensionality is going to be lossy, which means it will have gaps between what it thinks is the reality and what is.
Confabulation has to do with degradation of biological processes and information storage.
There is no equivalent in a LLM. Once the data is recorded it will be recalled exactly the same up to the bit. A LLM representation is immutable. You can download a model a 1000 times, run it for 10 years, etc. and the data is the same. The closes that you get is if you store the data in a faulty disk, but that is not why LLMs output is so awful, that would be a trivial problem to solve with current technology. (Like having a RAID and a few checksums).
Replies
> No. LLMs do not confabulate they bullshit. There is a big difference. AIs do not care, cannot care, have not capacity to care about the output. String tokens in, string tokes out. Even if they have all the data perfectly recorded they will still fail to use it for a coherent output.
Isn't "caring" a necessary pre-requisite for bullshitting? One either bullshits because they care, or don't care, about the context.
You seem confident. Can you get it to bullshit on GPT-5.4 thinking? Use a text prompt spanning 3-4 pages and lets see if it gets it wrong.
I haven't seen any counter examples, so you may give some examples to start with.
I don't even think they bullshit, since that requires conscious effort that they do not an cannot possess. They just simply interpret things incorrectly sometimes, like any of us meatbags.