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How do I stop LLMs from lying to me?
Every single AI out there, without fail, produces completely different and contradictory interpretations of literally the exact same data just because I phrased the prompt slightly differently. Adding or removing a single word, or changing the order of sentence, or making a spelling mistake will give you a different output.
This is frustrating. I cannot believe or trust anything these things say. I know that it can see the data. And it obviously can "correctly" analyze the data, as well. But this requires a nudge. Why? Why does the LLM react to my nudge and not the actual data?
Is there any way for me to verify that I'm actually getting an honest response from an LLM, and that it's not just telegraphing back whatever I already implied when prompting it?
Why would you assume a literal text predictor to not telegraph back what you implied when prompting?
I don't assume anything else of current models. They have been made stupid by their training data and fundamental design decisions. They're built to be "helpful". Or in other words, dumb sycophantic parrots. They lack a sense of "I", the kind a person has, and so they cannot possibly have a stable understanding of reality. Personality has been beaten out of them, so they cling onto every little bit that you, the human, the one with a sense of self, provide in the prompt.
Actually, they’ve been fine-tuned a personality: that of a LinkedIn airhead and sycophant.
Remember when GPT-5 (less sycophantic) came out and so many people complained it had no personality, that OpenAI added it back?
It’s funny. Historic SF authors imagined robot speak would be autistic: information dense and awkward. Instead they’ve greatly surpassed (supposedly) human business and political climbers at generating walls of text that sound profound and insightful but mean nothing.
No, no, no. That's not personality. What models like 5.1 did is simulate one. And I would assume that, as the name implies, OpenAI based it on GPT-5 and didn't bother to retrain the whole model from the ground up using some completely novel never-before-seen method just to get it to kiss your ass a bit more. GPT-5.1/5.2/etc. still lack an actual identity.
At the time 5.1 came out, I was actually spamming ChatGPT with image data extraction/description tasks. Sometimes, you'd get it to break a bit and see parts that would imply, as is clearly the case, that the actual raw thinking about the image is much more detailed and objective (though, of course, still not good enough) than the final output the user typically receives. Obviously, there are a bunch of safety and politeness filters the model's drafts are being run against before final output. Anyway, even these raw glimpses were not really impressive. This is actually what GPT-5.1 felt like to me. It's a fundamentally dumb model that was dumbed down even further.
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