Post #1802970

2026-04-09 11:29 UTC

@ngaylinn @UlrikeHahn Sorry if saying "do you?" came across as aggressive or combative. It wasn't meant that way. Perhaps I should have said "do we?" I simply wanted to make the comparison between LLMs and humans. In most of these discussions people paint the LLMs as missing something fundamentally necessary for producing facts. This is usually by contrast with humans. My point is that there are no _fundamental_ differences.

Replies (2)

@pbloem@sigmoid.social 2026-04-09 11:32

@ngaylinn @UlrikeHahn Practically, the models are not as good as we are at a lot of things, but the fact that they are "statistical" is no reason to claim that they are fundamentally incapable of producing truthful answers. Any such argument would apply to people as well. In practice, the story is different. They are imperfect, being manipulated by billionaires and have weird unpredictable failure modes. I totally agree there.

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@UlrikeHahn@fediscience.org 2026-04-09 12:57

@pbloem @ngaylinn I’m with Peter here in as much as I think there are two different things frequently being run together in ways the Tufecki quote exemplifies: the obvious limitations and problems in LLMs with respect to reliable output (see Nate’s list) and an epistemological assumption about humans that somehow truthfulness and truth maintenance rest on some obvious (but completely unelucidated) internal human design feature that LLMs lack. It’s that latter epistemological assumption about humans that seems problematic to me.

Open ##1802972