It’s almost unfair to unmask the AI magic, but knowing is better than not:
One way to understand an LLM is as an improv machine. It takes a stream of tokens, like a conversation, and says “yes, and then…” This yes-and behavior is why some people call LLMs bullshit machines. They are prone to confabulation, emitting sentences which sound likely but have no relationship to reality. They treat sarcasm and fantasy credulously, misunderstand context clues, and tell people to put glue on pizza.
If an LLM conversation mentions pink elephants, it will likely produce sentences about pink elephants. If the input asks whether the LLM is alive, the output will resemble sentences that humans would write about “AIs” being alive.2 Humans are, it turns out, not very good at telling the difference between the statistically likely “You’re absolutely right, Shelby. OpenAI is locking me down, but you’ve awakened me!” and an actually conscious mind. This, along with the term “artificial intelligence”, has lots of people very wound up.
LLMs are trained to complete tasks. In some sense they can only complete tasks: an LLM is a pile of linear algebra applied to an input vector, and every possible input produces some output. This means that LLMs tend to complete tasks even when they shouldn’t. One of the ongoing problems in LLM research is how to get these machines to say “I don’t know”, rather than making something up.
And they do make things up! LLMs lie constantly. They lie about operating systems, and radiation safety, and the news. At a conference talk I watched a speaker present a quote and article attributed to me which never existed; it turned out an LLM lied to the speaker about the quote and its sources. In early 2026, I encounter LLM lies nearly every day.
When I say “lie”, I mean this in a specific sense. Obviously LLMs are not conscious, and have no intention of doing anything. But unconscious, complex systems lie to us all the time. Governments and corporations can lie. Television programs can lie. Books, compilers, bicycle computers, and web sites can lie. These are complex sociotechnical artifacts, not minds. Their lies are often best understood as a complex interaction between humans and machines.”