It’s time to call a spade a spade. ChatGPT isn’t just hallucinating. It’s a bullshit machine.
From TFA (thanks @mxtiffanyleigh for sharing):
"Bullshit is ‘any utterance produced where a speaker has indifference towards the truth of the utterance’. That explanation, in turn, is divided into two “species”: hard bullshit, which occurs when there is an agenda to mislead, or soft bullshit, which is uttered without agenda.
“ChatGPT is at minimum a soft bullshitter or a bullshit machine, because if it is not an agent then it can neither hold any attitudes towards truth nor towards deceiving hearers about its (or, perhaps more properly, its users’) agenda.”
https://futurism.com/the-byte/researchers-ai-chatgpt-hallucinations-terminology
Sometimes a bullshitter is what you need. Ever looked at a multiple choice exam in a subject you know nothing about but feel like you could pass anyway just based on vibes? That’s a kind of bullshitting, too. There are a lot of problems like that in my daily work between the interesting bits, and I’m happy that a bullshit engine is good enough to do most of that for me with my oversight. Saves a lot of time on the boring work.
It ain’t a panacea. I wouldn’t give a gun to a monkey and I wouldn’t give chatgpt to a novice. But for me it’s awesome.