the fact that the output of LLMs can’t be copyrighted

That may be the status quo right now, but I expect tech and media companies will fight tooth and nail to gain copyright protections over the slop they generate. A few bribes donations to the right politicians and you can get legislation that grants whatever rights you want.

Verizon has been laying off people like crazy since Q4 of last year… but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence and this outage has nothing to do with cost cutting…

But how would you use words to explain the phenomenon?

I don’t know, I’ve been struggling to find the right ‘sound bite’ for it myself. The problem is that all of the simplified explanations encourage people to anthropomorphize these things, which just further fuels the toxic hype cycle.

In the end, I’m unsure which does more damage.

Is it better to convince people the AI “lies”, so they’ll stop using it? Or is it better to convince people AI doesn’t actually have the capacity to lie so that they’ll stop shoveling money onto the datacenter altar like we’ve just created some bullshit techno-god?

It refers to when an LLM will in some way try to deceive or manipulate the user interacting with it.

I think this still gives the model too much credit by implying that there’s any sort of intentionally behind this behavior.

There’s not.

These models are trained on the output of real humans and real humans lie and deceive constantly. All that’s happening is that the underlying mathematical model has encoded the statistical likelihood that someone will lie in a given situation. If that statistical likelihood is high enough, the model itself will lie when put in a similar situation.