LLM Models Are Bullshit Engines

Your LLM System Doesn’t Have to Be Harry Frankfurt wrote a wonderful essay called On Bullshit. His central move is a distinction most people miss: the difference between a liar and a bullshitter. The liar cares about the truth. He has to. Truth is what a liar wants to conceal, and you cannot conceal what you have not first located. Lying is a truth-tracking activity performed in reverse. The bullshitter doesn’t care about the truth at all. Not for it, not against it. Truth is simply not a variable in his function. His goal is to persuade, to impress, to manage how he is perceived. Whether the words happen to be true is incidental. That’s an LLM model. I’m not the first person to make this connection. In 2024, three philosophers at the University of Glasgow, Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries, and Joe Slater, published a paper in Ethics and Information Technology titled, with admirable economy, ChatGPT is bullshit. They make the Frankfurtian case rigorously. They also argue that…