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LLMs are an interesting, useful technology.

The "chatbot" format is a cognitive hazard, and places users in a funhouse mirror maze reflecting back all sorts of mental and conceptual distortions.

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If they were developed to actually tell people the truth, rather than simply be a sycophant, things might be different. But as Pilate said all those years ago "what is truth".

Well, truth is hard to pin down, let alone computationally. But the sycophancy is definitely a problem.

syncophancy and truth are orthogonal. It could correct an error that's been pointed out without prefacing it with "You're absolutely right!". It could move the goal posts and be angry and say that while you're right in this instance, I'm (the LLM) still right in these cases.

Given that they still hallucinate wildly at inopportune times though, like you say, what is truth?

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