{"id":218878,"date":"2025-07-28T00:04:25","date_gmt":"2025-07-28T05:04:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/why-ai-chatbots-lie-to-us"},"modified":"2025-07-28T00:04:25","modified_gmt":"2025-07-28T05:04:25","slug":"why-ai-chatbots-lie-to-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/why-ai-chatbots-lie-to-us","title":{"rendered":"Why AI chatbots lie to us"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/logo.why-ai-chatbots-lie-to-us.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine needed to collect and format some data from a website, and he asked the latest version of Anthropic\u2019s generative AI system, Claude, for help. Claude cheerfully agreed to perform the task, generated a computer program to download the data, and handed over perfectly formatted results. The only problem? My colleague immediately noticed that the data Claude delivered was entirely fabricated.<\/p>\n<p>When asked why it had made up the data, the chatbot apologized profusely, noting that the website in question didn\u2019t provide the requested data, so instead the chatbot generated \u201cfictional participant data\u201d with \u201cfake names\u2026and results,\u201d admitting \u201cI should never present fabricated data as if it were scraped from actual sources.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I have encountered similar examples of gaslighting by AI chatbots. In one <a href=\"https:\/\/amandaguinzburg.substack.com\/p\/diabolus-ex-machina\">widely circulated transcript<\/a>, a writer asked ChatGPT to help choose which of her essays to send to a literary agent, providing links to each one. The chatbot effusively praised each essay, with details such as \u201c[The essay] shows range\u2014emotional depth <i>and<\/i> intellectual elasticity\u201d and \u201cit\u2019s an intimate slow burn that reveals a lot with very little.\u201d After several rounds of this, the writer started to suspect that something was amiss. The praise was effusive, but rather generic. She asked \u201cWait, are you actually reading these?\u201d ChatGPT assured her, \u201cI am actually reading them\u2014every word,\u201d and then quoted certain of the writer\u2019s lines that \u201ctotally stuck with me.\u201d But those lines didn\u2019t actually appear in any of the essays. When challenged, ChatGPT admitted that it could not actually access the essays, and for each one, \u201cI didn\u2019t read the piece and I pretended I had.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine needed to collect and format some data from a website, and he asked the latest version of Anthropic\u2019s generative AI system, Claude, for help. Claude cheerfully agreed to perform the task, generated a computer program to download the data, and handed over perfectly formatted results. The only [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218878\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}