> Lies. Bullshit. Con artistry.

These are worse as they imply the thing generating the words knows the truth and purposely says something else.

An LLM is just doing next token prediction. It's a mathematical process. It's not trying to "hide" the truth from you.

For me, hallucination is better.

Lies, BS, and Con artistry all require conscious motive and intent. Thats a bridge to far, for me, in ascribing ‘intelligence’ to these models.

Hallucination, to me, conveys ‘seeing things (facts) that are not there’. To the extent the models are ‘perceiving’, they ARE perceiving reality incorrectly. Granted, I expect many times it’s because the source of the model training data are, at best, just wrong or are lying.

Those are very inaccurate descriptors. A lie is an intentional deception, which is impossible for GPT. It "believes" that it "knows" something about the world, which happens to have been made up wholesale by its "subconscious" (obviously I know it's not a human brain). That is pretty much a hallucination by definition, applied to a non-human "intelligence".

Besides,

> it's presenting wholesale fiction as fact both coherently and with absolute confidence

That is not in any way distinct from perceiving reality incorrectly. It is a symptom common to both skilled lying and hallucination.