Do LLMs "have" the "abillity" to be told they are wrong or incorrect and be able to contest that?
2026-06-21 07:43 UTC
Replies (11)
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@affenlehrer@feddit.org 2026-06-21 08:11
It depends on training, promoting and reasoning capabilities. Sometimes they’re prompted to not be assertive. You can often tell them though to e.g. “behave like an XYZ expert in a bad mood who doesn’t accept nonsense”. I’ve had e.g. ChatGPT contest me a lot even though I was right. It was about a bicycle brake design I had never seen before. It gave me some options of what it could be and helped me to actually find out what it was. However after I did some research and found out what the actual type was it kept doubting my result and insisted it was a different kind of brake.
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@SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 2026-06-21 08:11
Give it a shot. They’re just sycophantic stochastic parrots anyway.
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@Shellofbiomatter@lemmus.org 2026-06-21 08:13
It would have just agreed and reinforced you and claimed you’re the greatest to figure it out. Current LLMs just say whatever you want to hear, those have no understanding of what is right or wrong information.
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@dosse91@lemmy.trippy.pizza 2026-06-21 10:01
Yes, but they usually have a system prompt telling them to be super polite. I’ve been using Qwen3.6 a lot lately to debug a shitty old game that doesn’t want to work in wine and during the thinking process it said more than once things like “The user is wrong, […]”, but at the end it always said something polite like “You are right to say that X, but it’s more correct to say that Y, …”.
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@SkyNTP@lemmy.ml 2026-06-21 11:39
LLMs have no opinions. They are merely mathematical models that predict how an average person (mostly Internet people) might respond plus a little bit of invisible priming baked in to steer the behaviour a little (which is also easy to change yourself). A lot of these chatbots, notoriously chatgpt, are heavily primed to pander to the user.
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@MNByChoice@midwest.social 2026-06-21 12:45
Yes. I have had either Gemini or ChatGPT tell me I was wrong. There is a video of a person timing a ~5 second run with ChatGPT and it insisted their run was 10 minutes. Is this ability useful? Debatable.
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@KnightOfOldEmpire@lemmy.ml 2026-06-22 06:02
Not as such, as you need to find what’s the source of their information and if you do point out the error, they will usually answer with something like “I’m just a Database, I’m not responsible for what’s been put in me, what do you want me to do about it”.
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@daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-06-22 16:35
They have the ability to say whatever they are trained to say. You just need a training set with the inputs and outputs you want.
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@geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml 2026-06-22 17:44
Yes, but you’ll mostly only activate this when you start asking about dangerous stuff like medical advice. They are glad to go along with any other opinion you might have.
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@VoodooMischief@lemmy.ca 2026-06-22 15:49
A concept that I think is really helpful for interpreting what an LLM does is the concept of a “Chinese room”. The idea is someone slips a piece of paper containing a message in Chinese under the door and inside that room is someone that doesn’t know Chinese following a set of rules for converting characters and numerals into a response based off their syntax. Afterwards the person in the room creates a response and slips it back out under the door. At no point does the person in the room understand the Chinese in the input or in the output, but the person standing outside of the room might believe there is a Chinese speaker inside of the room. This is the same idea with computerized outputs like LLMs. They only provide the illusion of intentionality and don’t actually have an understanding of inputs or their outputs.
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@plutopos@lemmy.zip 2026-06-23 17:48
Why don’t you try?