ChatGPT is bullshit | Ethics and Information Technology
Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called “AI hallucinations”. We argue that these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs. We distinguish two ways in which the models can be said to be bullshitters, and argue that they clearly meet at least one of these definitions. We further argue that describing AI misrepresentations as bullshit is both a more useful and more accurate way of predicting and discussing the behaviour of these systems.
Large language models (LLMs), programs which use reams of available text and probability calculations in order to create seemingly-human-produced writing, have become increasingly sophisticated and convincing over the last several years, to the point where some commentators suggest that we may now be approaching the creation of artificial general intelligence (see e.g. Knight, 2023 and Sarkar, 2023). Alongside worries about the rise of Skynet and the use of LLMs such as ChatGPT to replace work that could and should be done by humans, one line of inquiry concerns what exactly these programs are up to: in particular, there is a question about the nature and meaning of the text produced, and of its connection to truth. In this paper, we argue against the view that when ChatGPT and the like produce false claims they are lying or even hallucinating, and in favour of the position that the activity they are engaged in is bullshitting, in the Frankfurtian sense (Frankfurt, 2002, 2005). Because these programs cannot themselves be concerned with truth, and because they are designed to produce text that looks truth-apt without any actual concern for truth, it seems appropriate to call their outputs bullshit.
