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Comment by mattbruv | Hacker News Reader

> I wish there was a name for this situation. It’s almost like a pseudo-language where it has the correct form and presentation but is missing critical components.

Bullshit?

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I understand the sentiment, but not quite what I’m thinking. It’s not that the AI is necessarily wrong, it’s more like, it replaces clarity with rich but unhelpful text. Maybe like candy. Full of flavor, texture and color but lacking the nutrients.

The way I like to describe it is that it feels slippery, like it's been polished down to oblivion and my eyes slide right off of it. There's no place to find a mental foothold, and if you zoom in there aren't any details.

But I also like your candy analogy because I think it's spot-on for how LLM text superficially looks informational/nutritious, even though it's actually just junk.

In German we call this "Hegelei". Using a lot of fancy words and complex sentences to obscure how little content they have.

No no no. Harry Frankfurt wrote at length the difference between liars (who care about the truth, and twist it) and bullshitters (who don’t care about the truth, but just the way they’re received).

This is some third category of untruth. Almost more sinister than the other two altogether.

I think, they don’t care about truth at all, just whether the reviewer rates it highly. Otherwise, it would be deleted after that round of training. It values test-taking ability over critical thinking.

My two favourite words for this are “conditioned” and “catechized” where the latter is a bit more on the nose but way more obscure.

"A third category of untruth" is a great expression, thank you.

A lot of it is hedging and using lots words to avoid saying something that isn't true. That way, it looks a lot like text that contains meaningful information, even though it doesn't. The speaker can pass the scrutiny of an informed audience, because they are able to substitute their knowledge into the words, as if by pareidolia. It's the sort of 'diplomatic' language you see from politicians, lawyers, students writing essays, and any other moderately intelligent person who is put in a position where they will face consequences for not answering. Behind all the fluff, there is a very loud voice yelling "I DON'T KNOW."

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