> If you had a friend that kept telling you about their trips to restaurants that didn't actually exist, or a junior developer at work that made up fictional APIs when they didn't know the answer to a question, you'd tell them to stop, and if they kept at it you probably wouldn't care to hang out with them. ChatGPT seems to bypass those natural defenses for now.
While this is a reasonable thing to hope for, I'd like to point out that former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been making things up for his entire career, repeatedly getting into trouble for it when caught, and yet somehow he managed to keep failing upwards in the process.
So even in humans, our defences assume the other person is capable of recognised the difference between truth and fiction; when they can't — and it is my opinion that Johnson genuinely can't tell rather than that he merely keeps choosing to lie, given how stupid some of the lies have been — then our defences are bypassed.
People like Johnson and Trump are exactly the exceptions that prove the rule. When they act like they do, they are reviled for it by most because of how aberrant their behavior is. They fail up because that revulsion is politically useful.
While this is a reasonable thing to hope for, I'd like to point out that former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been making things up for his entire career, repeatedly getting into trouble for it when caught, and yet somehow he managed to keep failing upwards in the process.
So even in humans, our defences assume the other person is capable of recognised the difference between truth and fiction; when they can't — and it is my opinion that Johnson genuinely can't tell rather than that he merely keeps choosing to lie, given how stupid some of the lies have been — then our defences are bypassed.