this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
358 points (95.9% liked)
Technology
74247 readers
5984 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It annoys me that Chat GPT flat out lies to you when it doesn’t know the answer, and doesn’t have any system in place to admit it isn’t sure about something. It just makes it up and tells you like it’s fact.
That’s actually one thing that got significantly improved with GPT-5, fewer hallucinations. Still not perfect of course
I’m more inclined to believe it’s gotten better at being convincing.
LLMs don't have any awareness of their internal state, so there's no way for them to see something as a gap of knowledge.
Took me ages to understand this. I'd thought "If an AI doesn't know something, why not just say so?“
The answer is: that wouldn't make sense because an LLM doesn't know ANYTHING
Wouldn't it make sense for an ai to provide a confidence level though?
I've got 3 million bits of info on this topic but only 4 of them lead to this solution. Confidence level =1.5%
It's always funny to me when people do add 'confidence scores' to LLMs, because it always amounts to just adding 'say how confident you are with low, medium or high in your response' to th prompt, and then you have made up confidences for made up replies. And you can tell clients that it's just made up and not actual confidence, but they will insist that they need it anyways…
That doesn’t justify flat out making shit up to everyone else, though. If a client is told information is made up but they use it anyway, that’s on the client. Although I’d argue that an LLM shouldn’t be in the business of making shit up unless specifically instructed to do so by the client.
It doesn't have "3 million bits of info" on a specific topic, or even if it did, it wouldn't be able to directly measure it. It's worth reading a bit about how LLMs work behind the hood, because although somewhat dense if you're new to the concepts, you come out knowing a lot more about what to expect when using them, what the limitations actually are and how to use them better if you decide to go that route.
You could do this with logprobs. The language model itself has basically no real insight into its confidence but there's more that you can get out of the model besides just the text.
The problem is that those probabilities are really "how confident are you that this text should come next in this conversation" not "how confident are you that this text is true/accurate." It's a fundamental limitation at the moment I think.
It doesn't admit anything, it's a language machine
It doesn‘t know that it doesn‘t know because it doesn‘t actually know anything. Most models are trained on posts from the internet like this one where people rarely ever just chime in to admit they don‘t have an answer anyway. If you don‘t know something you either silently search the web for an answer or ask.
So since users are the ones asking ChatGPT, the LLM mimics the role of a person that knows the answer. It only makes sense AI is a „confidently wrong“ powerhouse.
Chat GPT makes up everything it says. It’s just good at guessing and bullshitting.
It's literally a guess machine ..
It's a feature. Not a bug of LLMs.
It wouldnt finish a lyric for me yesterday because it was copyrighted. I sid it was public domain and it said "You are absolutely right, given its release date it is under copyright protection"
Wtf
yeah, there are guardrails but for copyright, not for bullshit. ig they think copyrighted content is worse than bullshit.
In the end it's a word generator that has been trained so much it uses facts often enough to be convincing. That's its basic architecture.
You can ask it to give a confidence level to have an indication of how sure it is of the answer.
Someone I know (not close enough to even call an "internet friend") formed a sadistic bond with chatGPT and will force it to apologize and admit being stupid or something like that when he didn't get the answer he's looking for.
I guess that's better than doing it to a person I suppose.
Chat GPT makes up everything it says. It’s just good at guessing and bullshitting.