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majormajortoday at 5:03 PM4 repliesview on HN

"Honesty" seems like unnecessary (and annoying) anthropomorphism there. I don't think there's any intent of fraud or deception in outputs from these things, just overreaching of prediction. Based on the latter part of the paragraph, I wish they'd just say something like "less likely to skip steps or overemphasize thin evidence" in the first place.

Don't play to the sci-fi "this thing's trying to outsmart me" tropes.


Replies

Kirotoday at 5:08 PM

Using words people understand is more important than this strange fixation on not anthropomorphizing things.

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swader999today at 5:14 PM

Just swap 'Honesty' with 'correctness in its claims' and you'll get what you need out of this aspect of the model description.

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adamtaylor_13today at 5:26 PM

People get so wrapped around the axle with "anthropomorphizing". For regular folks with no technical background, sure maybe a bit of caveat sprinkled here or there is useful to help them understand what is or isn't true, but on HN it would seem to me that the bar is high enough that we can just use shared language to generally talk about capabilities.

When they say "Honesty" I don't think to myself, "Goodness, does this model have moral understanding?" No, I understand they mean it's less likely to directly bullshit me, which models frequently do.

I don't feel like this level of pedantry around language is useful for people who more or less know what's going on with LLMs. (Again, I concede that perhaps with a less technical audience, there's more need for it.)

krupantoday at 8:53 PM

I agree. In connection with LLMs we also shouldn't use the words intelligent, smart, reasoning, thinking, chat, conversation, etc.