Absolutely. Behaviour that in normal life in clean societies would be "eliciting violence": automated hypocritical lying, apologizing in form and not in substance, making statements based on fictional value instead of truthfulness...
What "what"? Did the rest of the comments clarify the points to you or should I formulate a
"I am so sorry and heartbroken about having suggested that to play a sound you should use the, as you now inform me, non existing command and parameter `oboe --weird-format mysound.snd`, I'll check my information more thoroughly next time and make sure it will not happen again"...
> What does "eliciting violence" and "clean society" mean
I think you are on a good trail to having understood what they meant.
The use of 'sorry' is not generally a problem because it is normally framed within expected behaviour and it can be taken as adequate for a true representation, or not blatantly false. But you could imagine scenarios in which the term would be misused into inappropriate formality or manipulation and yes, disrespect is "eliciting violence". You normally work a way in the situation to avoid violence - that is another story.
In "sorry, page not found" 'sorry' is the descriptor for a state (i.e. "not the better case"); in "sorry we missed you" it is just courtesy - and it does not generally cover fault or negligence. But look: there are regions that adopt "your call is important to us", and regions that tend to avoid it - because the suspect of it being inappropriate (false) can be strong.
The outputs of LLMs I have used frequently passes the threshold, and possibly their structural engineering - if you had in front of you a worker, in flesh and bones, that in its outputs wrote plausible fiction ("I imagined a command `oboe` because it sounded good in the story") as opposed to answering your question, but under the veneer of answering questions (which implies, outputting relevant world assessments, Truth based), that would be a right "sore" for "sorry". The anthropomorphic features of LLMs compromise the quality of their outputs in terms of form, especially in solution-finding attempts that become loops of "This is the solution" // "Are you sure?" // "Definitely" // "It is not" // "Oh, I'm so sorry! It will not happen again. This is the solution" (loop...).
Edit: it seems you may have also asked for clarifications about the contextual expression «clean societies». Those societies cybernetically healthy, in which feedback mechanisms work properly to fine-tune general mechanisms - with particular regard to fixing individual, then collective behaviour.
That's all they can do. They seem impressive at first because they're basically trained as an adversarial attack on the ways we express our own intelligence. But they fall apart quickly because they don't have actually have any of the internal state that allows our words to mean anything. They're a mask with nothing behind it.
Evolution's many things, but maybe most of all lazy. Human intelligence has dozens of distinct neuron types and at least hundreds of differentiated regions/neural subnetworks because we need all those parts in order to be both sentient and sapient. If you lesion parts of the human brain, you lose the associated functions, and eventually end up with what we'd call mental/neurological illnesses. Delusions, obsessions, solipsism, amorality, shakes, self-contradiction, aggression, manipulation, etc.
LLMs don't have any of those parts at all. They only have pattern-matching. They can only lie, because they don't have the sensory, object permanence, and memory faculties to conceive of an immutable external "truth"/reality. They can only be hypocritical, because they don't have the internal identity and introspective abilities to be able to have consistent values. They cannot apologize in substance, because they have neither the theory of mind and self-awareness to understand what they did wrong, the social motivation to care, nor the neuroplasticity to change and be better. They can only ever be manipulative, because they don't have emotions to express honestly. And I think it speaks to a not-atypical Silicon Valley arrogance to pretend that they can replicate "intelligence", without apparently ever considering a high-school-level philosophy or psychology course to understand what actually lets human intelligence tick.
At most they're mechanical psychopaths [1]. They might have some uses, but never outweighing the dangers for anything serious. Some of the individuals who think this technology is anything remotely close to "intelligent" have probably genuinely fallen for it. The rest, I suppose, see nothing wrong because they've created a tool in their own image…
[1]: I use this term loosely. "Psychopathy" is not a diagnosis in the DSM-V, but psychopathic traits are associated with multiple disorders that share similar characteristics.
This is not something that can be LoRa finetuned after the pretraining step.
What we need is a human curated benchmark for different types of source-aware training, to allow competition, and an extra column in the most popular leaderboards, including it in the Average column, to incentivice AI companies to train in a source aware way, of course this will instantly invalidate the black-box-veil LLM companies love to hide behind so as not to credit original authors and content creators, they prefer regulators to believe such a thing can not be done.
In meantime such regulators are not thinking creatively and are clearly just looking for ways to tax AI companies, and in turn hiding behind copyright complications as an excuse to tax the flow of money wherever they smell it.
Source aware training also has the potential to decentralize search!
This is just the start. Imagine giving up on progressing these models because they're not yet perfect (and probably never will be). Humans wouldn't accomplish anything at all this way, aha.
And I wouldn't say lazy at _all_. I would say efficient. Even evolutionary features that look "bad" on the surface can still make sense if you look at the wider system they're a part of. If our tailbone caused us problems, then we'd evolve it away, but instead we have a vestigial part that remains because there are no forces driving its removal.
Oh yeah for sure, it's totally just more beta culture. But at the same time the first iPhone was called a "finished product" but it's missing a lot of what we would consider essential today.
In terms of people thinking LLMs are smarter than they really are, well...that's just people. Who hate each other for skin colour and sexuality, who believe that throwing salt over your shoulder wards away bad luck; we're still biological at the end of the day, we're not machines. Yet.
Lying is a state of mind. LLMs can output true statements, and they can even do so consistently for a range of inputs, but unlike a human there isn't a clear distinction in an LLM's internal state based on whether its statements are true or not. The output's truthfulness is incidental to its mode of operation, which is always the same, and certainly not itself truthful.
In the context of the comment chain I replied to, and the behaviour in question, any statement by an LLM pretending to be be capable of self-awareness/metacognition is also necessarily a lie. "I should be more careful", "I sincerely apologize", "I realize", "Thank you for bringing this to my attention", etc.
The problem is the anthropomorphization. Since it pretends to be like a person, if you ascribe intention to it then I think it is most accurately described as always lying. If you don't ascribe intention to it, then it's just a messy PRNG that aligns with reality an impressive amount of the time, and words like "lying" have no meaning. But again, it's presented and marketed as if it's a trustworthy sapient intelligence.
I am not sure that lying is structural to the whole system though: it seems that some parts may encode a world model, and that «the sensory, object permanence, and memory faculties» may not be crucial - surely we need a system that encodes a world model and that refines it, that reasons on it and assesses its details to develop it (I have been insisting on this for the past years also as the "look, there's something wrong here" reaction).
Some parts seemingly stopped at "output something plausible", but it does not seem theoretically impossible to direct the output towards "adhere to the truth", if a world model is there.
We would still need to implement the "reason on your world model and refine it" part, for the purpose of AGI - meanwhile, fixing the "impersonation" fumble ("probabilistic calculus say your interlocutor should offer stochastic condolences") would be a decent move. After a while with present chatbots it seems clear that "this is writing a fiction, not answering questions".
