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Computer Science > Computation and Language

arXiv:2411.15129 (cs)
[Submitted on 22 Nov 2024]

Title:Measuring Bullshit in the Language Games played by ChatGPT

Authors:Alessandro Trevisan, Harry Giddens, Sarah Dillon, Alan F. Blackwell
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Abstract:Generative large language models (LLMs), which create text without direct correspondence to truth value, are widely understood to resemble the uses of language described in Frankfurt's popular monograph On Bullshit. In this paper, we offer a rigorous investigation of this topic, identifying how the phenomenon has arisen, and how it might be analysed. In this paper, we elaborate on this argument to propose that LLM-based chatbots play the 'language game of bullshit'. We use statistical text analysis to investigate the features of this Wittgensteinian language game, based on a dataset constructed to contrast the language of 1,000 scientific publications with typical pseudo-scientific text generated by ChatGPT. We then explore whether the same language features can be detected in two well-known contexts of social dysfunction: George Orwell's critique of politics and language, and David Graeber's characterisation of bullshit jobs. Using simple hypothesis-testing methods, we demonstrate that a statistical model of the language of bullshit can reliably relate the Frankfurtian artificial bullshit of ChatGPT to the political and workplace functions of bullshit as observed in natural human language.
Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)
Cite as: arXiv:2411.15129 [cs.CL]
  (or arXiv:2411.15129v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2411.15129

Submission history

From: Alan Blackwell [view email]
[v1] Fri, 22 Nov 2024 18:55:21 UTC (486 KB)
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