🔗 ChatGPT is an engine of cultural transmission

“Gopnikism,” as Cosma has dubbed this understanding of LLMs, implies that these models are incapable of hallucinating falsehooods: in Yiu, Kosoy and Gopnik’s description, they are incapable of distinguishing between “veridical and nonveridical representations in the first place.” Or as Cosma puts it more bluntly, “an LLM isn’t doing anything differently when it ‘hallucinates’ as opposed to when it gets things right.”