Note: This is a personal essay by Matt Ranger, Kagi's head of ML In 1986, Harry Frankfurt wrote On Bullshit. He differentiates a lying from bullshitting: Lying means you have a concept of what is true,...
LLMs believe false statements even after explicit warnings that they're false
Fine-tuning tests show "bias... toward confidently representing the claims as true."
There's Something Fundamentally Wrong With LLMs
LLMs aren't trained on the "vast majority of speech," experts warn, a major blind spot that could have sweeping consequences.
LLMs are not like manufacturing machines - Ross Wintle
LLMs are not just machines. They are machine-building machines! This comes with way more responsibility. And understanding it may change how you use them.
Dan Shipper š§ on Twitter / X
this is true and is a big reason why you donāt need to be a highly technical researcher to use LLMs in surprising and novel ways https://t.co/TuxNzXzToUā Dan Shipper š§ (@danshipper) July 27, 2025
How LLMs are and are not like the brain
Hi from buttondown! At the bottom of this newsletter is a bit of administrivia about the new platform How LLMs are and are not like the brain Beneath all the...
Well-intentioned obscenity
An LLM lied about me at the office and I'm cranky about it. That interaction makes me think a lot about how LLMs are becoming normalized, though, and what we're looking at in terms of their role in human-to-human interactions in the future.
The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway.
I almost agree with all of the LLM critics, yet I still use LLMs a lot. I know this sounds like I am delusional, but I don't think I am alone with it.
The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway.
I almost agree with all of the LLM critics, yet I still use LLMs a lot. I know this sounds like I am delusional, but I don't think I am alone with it.
LLMs are a tool for thought
The oxygen from the air diffuses into your bloodstreams, is used for cellular respiration, and is transformed into carbon dioxide.
Why do LLMs make stuff up? New research peers under the hood.
Claude's faulty "known entity" neurons sometimes override its "don't answer" circuitry.
Against False Indulgences in LLM Alignment
Unnecessary moral concern, and the false indulgences that drive it.
When I say "bullshitting is inherent to LLMs," I don't mean it colloquially, I mean it empirically. Here's the bleeding edge of the frontier (Opus, Sol, Fable, Astra), and the lowest bullshit rate (answering wrongly instead of admitting ignorance) is 45%. artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience
I read this result as: LLMs do more bullshit citations, name-dropping without engaging.
infoDOCKET
Citing Less Critically: #LLMs Reshape the Rhetoric and Reach of #Scientific #Citation (New Research Article (preprint); via @arxiv.bsky.social) arxiv.org/abs/2609.01432 #scholcomm #citations #libraries #AI #GenAI
There's growing experimental evidenceĀ¹ĖĀ²ĖĀ³Ėā“ that LLMs are unusually good at talking people out of entrenched false beliefs and conspiracy theories. Ā¹ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39264999/ Ā² pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41179846/ Ā³ sciety.org/articles/activity/10.21203/rsā¦ ā“ connecticut.adl.org/resources/report/short-dialogā¦
Der Fisher
Unpopular opinion: LLMs are generally deradicalizing people whose beliefs are based on pure propaganda. I've been watching this happen slowly with some people I care about. ChatGPT is one of the reasons they finally accept that the NRA, OAN, and NewsMax are lying to them.
I've seen a lot of "saying AI is useless is hyperbolic" but the flipside hyperbole is denying that AI still has serious deficiencies. Bullshitting is inherent to the ways LLMs work. Whatever the formāerroneous facts, mangled data, fake cites, or the plagiarism hereāit's impossible to fully mitigate.
Timnit Gebru
Speaking of plagiarism: scientificamerican.com/article/openais-latest-math-bā¦
