[TUHS] Re: On the unreliability of LLM-based search results (was: Listing of early Unix source code from the Computer History Museum)

G. Branden Robinson: That's why I think Norman has sussed it out accurately. LLMs are fantastic bullshit generators in the Harry G. Frankfurt sense,[1] wherein utterances are undertaken neither to enlighten nor to deceive, but to construct a simulacrum of plausible discourse. BSing is a close cousin to filibustering, where even plausibility is discarded, often for the sake of running out a clock or impeding achievement of consensus. ==== That's exactly what I had in mind. I think I had read Frankfurt's book before I first started calling LLMs bullshit generators, but I can't remember for sure. I don't plan to ask ChatGPT (which still, at least sometimes, credits me with far greater contributions to Unix than I have actually made). Here's an interesting paper I stumbled across last week which presents the case better than I could: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5 To link this back to actual Unix history (or something much nearer that), I realized that `bullshit generator' was a reasonable summary of what LLMs do after also realizing that an LLM is pretty much just a much-fancier and better-automated descendant of Mark V Shaney: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney Norman Wilson Toronto ON