this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
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I've had this lengthy discussion before. Some people define a lie as an untrue statement, while others additionally require intent to deceive.
I would fall into the latter category. Lots of people are earnestly wrong without being liars.
Me, too. But it also means when some people say "that's a lie" they're not accusing you of anything, just remarking you're wrong. And that can lead to misunderstandings.
Yep. Those people are obviously "liars," since they are using an uncommon colloquial definition. 😉
The latter is the actual definition. Some people not knowing what words mean isnt an argument
Sure it is. You can define language all you want, the goal is to communicate with each other. The definition follows usage, not the other way around. Just look up the current definition for literally...
You never have 100% of people using a word the same if only because some portion of the population is stupid and illiterate and you have both drift over time and geography. So say at a given time of a billion people 99.995% believe the definition is A and 0.005% believe B. Periodically people correct people in B and some of them shift back to the overwhelming majority and sometimes new folks drift into B.
It is clearly at that point, 99.995% A, correct to say that the definition of the word is A and anyone who says B is wrong. This doesn't change if B becomes 10% but it might change if B becomes overwhelmingly dominant in which case it becomes correct. There is constantly small drifts mostly by people simply to stupid to find out what words means. Treating most of these as alternative definitions would be in a word inefficient.
Drift also isn't neutral. For instance using lie to mean anything which is wrong actually deprives the language of a common word to even mean that. It impoverishes the language and makes it harder to express ideas. There is every reason to prefer the correct definition that is also overwhelmingly used.
There are also words which belong to a technical nature which are defined not by usage but a particular discipline. A kidney is a kidney and it would be one if 90% of the dumb people said. Likewise a CPU never referred to the entire tower no matter how many AOL users said so.
This is a long way of saying that just because definition follows usage we should let functionally illiterate people say what they want and treat it as alternative facts.
You can specifically tell an ai to lie and deceive though, and it will…
This was just in the news today.. although the headline says that the ai become psychopathic, they just told the ai to be immoral or something
Every time an AI ever does anything newsworthy just because it's obeying it's prompt.
It's like the people that claim the AI can replicate itself, yeah if you tell it to. If you don't give an AI any instructions it'll sit there and do nothing.