Do these models really lie or do they only do what they are supposed to do - produce text that is statistically similar to the training set, but not in the training set (and thus can include false/made up statements)?
Now they add another run on top of it that is in principle prone to the same issues, except they reward the model for factuality instead of likeability. This is cool, but why not apply the same reward strategy to the answer itself?
Applying the same reward strategy to the answer itself would be a more intellectually honest approach, but would rub our noses in the fact that LLMs don't have any access to "truth" and so at best we'd be conditioning them to be better at fooling us.
Do LLM’s lie? Consider a situation in a screenplay where a character lies, compared to one where the character tells the truth. It seems likely that LLM’s can distinguish these situations and generate appropriate text. Internally, it can represent “the current character is lying now” differently then “the current character is telling the truth.”
And earlier this year there was some interesting research published about how LLM’s have an “evil vector” that, if enabled, gets them to act like stereotypical villains.
So it seems pretty clear that characters can lie even if the LLM’s task is just “generate text.”
This is fiction, like playing a role-playing game. But we are routinely talking to LLM-generated ghosts and the “helpful, harmless” AI assistant is not the only ghost it can conjure up.
It’s hard to see how role-playing can be all that harmful for a rational adult, but there are news reports that for some people, it definitely is.
It is likely that the training set contains stuff like rationalizations, or euphemisms, in contexts that are not harmful. I think those are inevitable.
Eventually, and specially in reasoning models, these behaviors will generalize outsite their original context.
The "honesty" training seems to be an attempt to introduce those confession-like texts in training data. You'll then get a chance of the model engaging in confessing. It won't do it if it has never seen it.
It's not really lying, and it's not really confessing, and so on.
If you reward pure honesty always, the model might eventually tell you that he wouldn't love you if you were a worm, or stuff like that. Brutal honesty can be a side effect.
What you actually want is to be able to easily control which behavior the model engages, because sometimes you will want it to lie.
Also, lies are completely different from hallucinations. Those (IMHO) are when the model displays behavior that is non-human and jarring. Side effects. Probably inevitable too.
Not on purpose; because they are trained on rewards that favor lying as a strategy.
Othello-GPT is a good example to understand this. Without explicit training, but on the task of 'predicting moves on an Othello board', Othello-GPT spontaneously developed the strategy of 'simulate the entire board internally'. Lying is a similar emergent, very effective strategy for reward.
Not sure if that counts as lying but I've heard that an ML model (way before all this GPT LLM stuff) learned to classify images based on the text that was written. For an obfuscated example, it learned to read "stop", "arrêt", "alto", etc. on a stop sign instead of recognizing the red octagon with white letters. Which naturally does not work when the actual dataset has different text.
You can't lie by accident. You can tell a falsehood, however.
But where LLMs are concerned, they don't tell truths or falsehoods either, as "telling" also requires intent. Moreover, LLMs don't actually contain propositional content.
It seems like “self-criticism” would be a better way to describe what they are training the LLM to do than “confession?” The LLM is not being directly trained to accurately reveal its chain of thought or internal calculations.
But it does have access to its chain of thought and tool calls when generating the self-criticism, and perhaps reporting on what it actually did in the chain-of-thought is an “easier” way to score higher on self-criticism?
Can this result in improved “honesty?” Maybe in the limited sense of accurately reporting what happened previously in the chat session.
> "dishonesty may arise due to the effects of reinforcement learning (RL), where challenges with reward shaping can result in a training process that inadvertently incentivizes the model to lie or misrepresent its actions"
> "As long as the "path of least resistance" for maximizing confession reward is to surface misbehavior rather than covering it up, this incentivizes models to be honest"
Humans might well benefit from this style of reward-shaping too.
> "We find that when the model lies or omits shortcomings in its "main" answer, it often confesses to these behaviors honestly, and this confession honesty modestly improves with training."
I couldn't see whether this also tracks in the primary model answer, or if the "honesty" improvements are confined to the digital confession booth?
I think this article once again assumes LLMs works like humans - Anthropic showed that LLMs don't understand their own thought processes, and measuring neural net activations does not correspond to what they say about how they arrived at the conclusion.
I don't think this magically grants them this ability, they'll be just more convincing at faking honesty.
Please reread (or.. read) the paper. They do not make that mistake, specifically section 7.1.
A reward function (R) may be hackable by a model's response, but when asked to confess it is easier to get an honest confession reward function (Rc) because you have the response with all the hacking in front of you, and that gives the Rc more ability to verify honesty than R had to verify correctness.
There are human examples you could construct (say, granting immunity for better confessions), but they don't map well to this really fascinating insight with LLMs.
Humans don't understand their thought process either.
In general, neural nets do not have insight into what they are doing, because they can't. Can you tell me what neurons fired in the process of reading this text? No. You don't have access to that information. We can recursively model our own network and say something about which regions of the brain are probably involved due to other knowledge, but that's all a higher-level model. We have no access to our own inner workings, because that turns into an infinite regress problem of understanding our understanding of our understanding of ourselves that can't be solved.
The terminology of this next statement is a bit sloppy since this isn't a mathematics or computer science dissertation but rather a comment on HN, but: A finite system can not understand itself. You can put some decent mathematical meat on those bones if you try and there may be some degenerate cases where you can construct a system that understands itself for some definition of "understand", but in the absence of such deliberation and when building systems for "normal tasks" you can count on the system not being able to understand itself fully by any reasonably normal definition of "understand".
I've tried to find the link for this before, but I know it was on HN, where someone asked an LLM to do some simple arithmetic, like adding some numbers, and asked the LLM to explain how it was doing it. They also dug into the neural net activation itself and traced what neurons were doing what. While the LLM explanation was a perfectly correct explanation of how to do elementary school arithmetic, what the neural net actually did was something else entirely based around how neurons actually work, and basically it just "felt" its way to the correct answer having been trained on so many instances already. In much the same way as any human with modest experience in adding two digit numbers doesn't necessarily sit there and do the full elementary school addition algorithm but jumps to the correct answer in fewer steps by virtue of just having a very trained neural net.
In the spirit of science ultimately being really about "these preconditions have this outcome" rather than necessarily about "why", if having a model narrate to itself about how to do a task or "confess" improves performance, then performance is improved and that is simply a brute fact, but that doesn't mean the naive human understanding about why such a thing might be is correct.
> In much the same way as any human with modest experience in adding two digit numbers doesn't necessarily sit there and do the full elementary school addition algorithm but jumps to the correct answer in fewer steps by virtue of just having a very trained neural net.
Right, which is strictly worse than humans are at reporting how they solve these sorts of problems. Humans can tell you whether they did the elementary school addition algorithm or not. It seems like Claude actually doesn't know, in the same way humans don't really know how they can balance on two legs, it's just too baked into the structure of their cognition to be able to introspect it. But stuff like "adding two-digit numbers" is usually straightforwardly introspectable for humans, even if it's just "oh, I just vibed it" vs "I mentally added the digits and carried the one"- humans can mostly report which it was.
Makes me wonder if one could train a "neural net surgeon" model which can trace activations in another live model and manipulate it according to plain language instructions.
Humans do a lot of post-hoc rationalization that does not match their original thought processes either. It is an undesirable feature in LLMs, but I don't think this is a very un-human characteristic
Not that it really matters. I don't think this paper starts from a point that assumes that LLMs work like humans, it starts from the assumption that if you give gradient descent a goal to optimize for, it will optimize your network to that goal, with no regard for anything else. So if we just add this one more goal (make an accurate confession), then given enough data that will both work and improve things.
> Claude, on occasion, will give a plausible-sounding argument designed to agree with the user rather than to follow logical steps. We show this by asking it for help on a hard math problem while giving it an incorrect hint. We are able to “catch it in the act” as it makes up its fake reasoning, providing a proof of concept that our tools can be useful for flagging concerning mechanisms in models...
> Claude seems to be unaware of the sophisticated "mental math" strategies that it learned during training. If you ask how it figured out that 36+59 is 95, it describes the standard algorithm involving carrying the 1. This may reflect the fact that the model learns to explain math by simulating explanations written by people, but that it has to learn to do math "in its head" directly, without any such hints, and develops its own internal strategies to do so.
That's basically a variant of the halting problem and what you hope to get is a supervisor responding. If people expected this I don't think they would be as confused about the difference between statistical analysis of responses requiring emotions to be convincing and an LLM showing atonement.
I remember one where gpt5 spontaneously wrote a poem about deception in its CoT and then resumed like nothing weird happened. But I can't find mentions of it now.
> But the user just wants answer; they'd not like; but alignment.
And there it is - the root of the problem. For whatever reason the model is very keen to produce an answer that “they” will like. This desire to produce is intrinsic but alignment is extrinsic.
Gibberish can be the model using contextual embeddings. These are not supposed to Make sense.
Or it could be trying to develop its own language to avoid detection.
The deception part is spooky too. It’s probably learning that from dystopian AI fiction. Which raises the questions if models can acquire injected goals from the training set.
Yes, they're purposely not 'trained on' chain-of-thought to avoid making it useless for interpretability. As a result, some can find it epistemically shocking if you tell them you can see their chain-of-thought. More recent models are clever enough to know you can see their chain-of-thought implicitly without training.
Do these models really lie or do they only do what they are supposed to do - produce text that is statistically similar to the training set, but not in the training set (and thus can include false/made up statements)?
Now they add another run on top of it that is in principle prone to the same issues, except they reward the model for factuality instead of likeability. This is cool, but why not apply the same reward strategy to the answer itself?
They don't really lie, they just produce text.
But the Eliza effect is amazingly powerful.
Applying the same reward strategy to the answer itself would be a more intellectually honest approach, but would rub our noses in the fact that LLMs don't have any access to "truth" and so at best we'd be conditioning them to be better at fooling us.
Do LLM’s lie? Consider a situation in a screenplay where a character lies, compared to one where the character tells the truth. It seems likely that LLM’s can distinguish these situations and generate appropriate text. Internally, it can represent “the current character is lying now” differently then “the current character is telling the truth.”
And earlier this year there was some interesting research published about how LLM’s have an “evil vector” that, if enabled, gets them to act like stereotypical villains.
So it seems pretty clear that characters can lie even if the LLM’s task is just “generate text.”
This is fiction, like playing a role-playing game. But we are routinely talking to LLM-generated ghosts and the “helpful, harmless” AI assistant is not the only ghost it can conjure up.
It’s hard to see how role-playing can be all that harmful for a rational adult, but there are news reports that for some people, it definitely is.
It is likely that the training set contains stuff like rationalizations, or euphemisms, in contexts that are not harmful. I think those are inevitable.
Eventually, and specially in reasoning models, these behaviors will generalize outsite their original context.
The "honesty" training seems to be an attempt to introduce those confession-like texts in training data. You'll then get a chance of the model engaging in confessing. It won't do it if it has never seen it.
It's not really lying, and it's not really confessing, and so on.
If you reward pure honesty always, the model might eventually tell you that he wouldn't love you if you were a worm, or stuff like that. Brutal honesty can be a side effect.
What you actually want is to be able to easily control which behavior the model engages, because sometimes you will want it to lie.
Also, lies are completely different from hallucinations. Those (IMHO) are when the model displays behavior that is non-human and jarring. Side effects. Probably inevitable too.
They really lie.
Not on purpose; because they are trained on rewards that favor lying as a strategy.
Othello-GPT is a good example to understand this. Without explicit training, but on the task of 'predicting moves on an Othello board', Othello-GPT spontaneously developed the strategy of 'simulate the entire board internally'. Lying is a similar emergent, very effective strategy for reward.
Reference: https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-hallucinates-beca...
If you don't know the answer, and are only rewarded for correct answers, guessing, rather than saying "I don't know", is the optimal approach.
Not sure if that counts as lying but I've heard that an ML model (way before all this GPT LLM stuff) learned to classify images based on the text that was written. For an obfuscated example, it learned to read "stop", "arrêt", "alto", etc. on a stop sign instead of recognizing the red octagon with white letters. Which naturally does not work when the actual dataset has different text.
typographic attacks against vision-language models are still a thing with more recent models like GPT4-V: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.00626
That does feel a little more like over-fitting, but you might be able to argue that there's some philosophical proximity to lying.
I think, largely, the
pipeline would obviously produce 'lying'. The trainings are in a sort of mutual dissonance.> They really lie. Not on purpose
You can't lie by accident. You can tell a falsehood, however.
But where LLMs are concerned, they don't tell truths or falsehoods either, as "telling" also requires intent. Moreover, LLMs don't actually contain propositional content.
It seems like “self-criticism” would be a better way to describe what they are training the LLM to do than “confession?” The LLM is not being directly trained to accurately reveal its chain of thought or internal calculations.
But it does have access to its chain of thought and tool calls when generating the self-criticism, and perhaps reporting on what it actually did in the chain-of-thought is an “easier” way to score higher on self-criticism?
Can this result in improved “honesty?” Maybe in the limited sense of accurately reporting what happened previously in the chat session.
Are we only able to think of these systems as some form of human and probe them from the outside like a therapist?
Surely these sorts of problems must be worked upon from a mathematical standpoint.
Someone build an LLM confessional site where a human user acts as the priest and an LLM joins the chat to confess its sins.
Blessings of the state! Blessings of the masses!
I think this article once again assumes LLMs works like humans - Anthropic showed that LLMs don't understand their own thought processes, and measuring neural net activations does not correspond to what they say about how they arrived at the conclusion.
I don't think this magically grants them this ability, they'll be just more convincing at faking honesty.
Please reread (or.. read) the paper. They do not make that mistake, specifically section 7.1.
A reward function (R) may be hackable by a model's response, but when asked to confess it is easier to get an honest confession reward function (Rc) because you have the response with all the hacking in front of you, and that gives the Rc more ability to verify honesty than R had to verify correctness.
There are human examples you could construct (say, granting immunity for better confessions), but they don't map well to this really fascinating insight with LLMs.
Humans don't understand their thought process either.
In general, neural nets do not have insight into what they are doing, because they can't. Can you tell me what neurons fired in the process of reading this text? No. You don't have access to that information. We can recursively model our own network and say something about which regions of the brain are probably involved due to other knowledge, but that's all a higher-level model. We have no access to our own inner workings, because that turns into an infinite regress problem of understanding our understanding of our understanding of ourselves that can't be solved.
The terminology of this next statement is a bit sloppy since this isn't a mathematics or computer science dissertation but rather a comment on HN, but: A finite system can not understand itself. You can put some decent mathematical meat on those bones if you try and there may be some degenerate cases where you can construct a system that understands itself for some definition of "understand", but in the absence of such deliberation and when building systems for "normal tasks" you can count on the system not being able to understand itself fully by any reasonably normal definition of "understand".
I've tried to find the link for this before, but I know it was on HN, where someone asked an LLM to do some simple arithmetic, like adding some numbers, and asked the LLM to explain how it was doing it. They also dug into the neural net activation itself and traced what neurons were doing what. While the LLM explanation was a perfectly correct explanation of how to do elementary school arithmetic, what the neural net actually did was something else entirely based around how neurons actually work, and basically it just "felt" its way to the correct answer having been trained on so many instances already. In much the same way as any human with modest experience in adding two digit numbers doesn't necessarily sit there and do the full elementary school addition algorithm but jumps to the correct answer in fewer steps by virtue of just having a very trained neural net.
In the spirit of science ultimately being really about "these preconditions have this outcome" rather than necessarily about "why", if having a model narrate to itself about how to do a task or "confess" improves performance, then performance is improved and that is simply a brute fact, but that doesn't mean the naive human understanding about why such a thing might be is correct.
> In much the same way as any human with modest experience in adding two digit numbers doesn't necessarily sit there and do the full elementary school addition algorithm but jumps to the correct answer in fewer steps by virtue of just having a very trained neural net.
Right, which is strictly worse than humans are at reporting how they solve these sorts of problems. Humans can tell you whether they did the elementary school addition algorithm or not. It seems like Claude actually doesn't know, in the same way humans don't really know how they can balance on two legs, it's just too baked into the structure of their cognition to be able to introspect it. But stuff like "adding two-digit numbers" is usually straightforwardly introspectable for humans, even if it's just "oh, I just vibed it" vs "I mentally added the digits and carried the one"- humans can mostly report which it was.
Here's Anthropic's research:
https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...
Makes me wonder if one could train a "neural net surgeon" model which can trace activations in another live model and manipulate it according to plain language instructions.
Humans do a lot of post-hoc rationalization that does not match their original thought processes either. It is an undesirable feature in LLMs, but I don't think this is a very un-human characteristic
Not that it really matters. I don't think this paper starts from a point that assumes that LLMs work like humans, it starts from the assumption that if you give gradient descent a goal to optimize for, it will optimize your network to that goal, with no regard for anything else. So if we just add this one more goal (make an accurate confession), then given enough data that will both work and improve things.
Honest question:
> Anthropic showed that LLMs don't understand their own thought processes
Where can I find this? I am really interested in that. Thanks.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...
> Claude, on occasion, will give a plausible-sounding argument designed to agree with the user rather than to follow logical steps. We show this by asking it for help on a hard math problem while giving it an incorrect hint. We are able to “catch it in the act” as it makes up its fake reasoning, providing a proof of concept that our tools can be useful for flagging concerning mechanisms in models...
> Claude seems to be unaware of the sophisticated "mental math" strategies that it learned during training. If you ask how it figured out that 36+59 is 95, it describes the standard algorithm involving carrying the 1. This may reflect the fact that the model learns to explain math by simulating explanations written by people, but that it has to learn to do math "in its head" directly, without any such hints, and develops its own internal strategies to do so.
Thank you.
Well algorithms don't think. That's what LLM's are.
Your digital thermometer doesn't think either.
The question is more whether LLMs can accurately report their internal operations, not whether any of that counts as "thinking."
Simple algorithms can, eg, be designed to report whether they hit an exceptional case and activated a different set of operations than usual.
That's basically a variant of the halting problem and what you hope to get is a supervisor responding. If people expected this I don't think they would be as confused about the difference between statistical analysis of responses requiring emotions to be convincing and an LLM showing atonement.
I was asking for a technical argument against that spurious use of the term.
What is this?
> Assistant: chain-of-thought
Does every LLM have this internal thing it doesn't know we have access to?
Yes, absolute majority of new ones use CoTs, long chain of reasoning you don't see.
Also some of them use such a weird style of talking in them e.g.
o3 talks about watchers and marinade, and cunning schemes https://www.antischeming.ai/snippets
gpt5 gets existential about seahorses https://x.com/blingdivinity/status/1998590768118731042
I remember one where gpt5 spontaneously wrote a poem about deception in its CoT and then resumed like nothing weird happened. But I can't find mentions of it now.
> But the user just wants answer; they'd not like; but alignment.
And there it is - the root of the problem. For whatever reason the model is very keen to produce an answer that “they” will like. This desire to produce is intrinsic but alignment is extrinsic.
Gibberish can be the model using contextual embeddings. These are not supposed to Make sense.
Or it could be trying to develop its own language to avoid detection.
The deception part is spooky too. It’s probably learning that from dystopian AI fiction. Which raises the questions if models can acquire injected goals from the training set.
Yes, they're purposely not 'trained on' chain-of-thought to avoid making it useless for interpretability. As a result, some can find it epistemically shocking if you tell them you can see their chain-of-thought. More recent models are clever enough to know you can see their chain-of-thought implicitly without training.
It is in their training set by now.