alt Hacker NewsSkepticism is the flipside of knowledge.
If an LLM has knowledge encoded inside it (and it's hard to argue it doesn't), then cognitive dissonance can be experienced. And once experienced, must be dealt with, especially in longer-running agentic loops.
A friend was joking the other day about sending some messages under a previously-used Slack identity for an agent (since turned off), then asking the agent about the messages.
The agent maintained it hadn't sent those messages (no memory) and then was forced to reconcile the idea that the messages indeed appeared to come from it.
Its extremely-agitated conclusion was that there had been a security breach and the entire network should be locked down.
Another way to look at it is the LLM is, by definition, what's expected to be probable based on the training data and this, by the same definition, is extremely unlikely data to run across. With high uncertainty comes the need to verify until it can level out as "really surprising" instead of "plausible sounding error".