A collage of images, featuring most prominently a person holding a sign reading "no justice no peace"

Monthly Archive: October 2025

AI / Education / Technology

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LLMs can be harmful, even when not making stuff up

This is a guest post by Joe Slater (University of Glasgow).

A screenshot of a phone, showing an AI generated summary in response to the question "How many rocks shall I eat".
Provided by author

It is well known that chatbots powered by LLMs – ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, etc. – sometimes make things up. People have sometimes called these “AI hallucinations”. With my co-authors, I have argued that we should describe chatbots as bullshitting, in the sense described by Harry Frankfurt, i.e., the content is produced with an indifference to the truth. Because of this, developing chatbots that no longer generate novel false utterances (or reduce the proportion of false utterances they output) has been a high priority for big tech companies. We can see this in the public statements made by, e.g., OpenAI, boasting of reduced hallucination rates.

One factor that is sometimes overlooked in this discourse is that generative AI can also be detrimental in that it may stifle development, even when it accurately depicts the information it has been trained on.

Recall the instance of the Google AI overview, which is powered by Google’s Gemini LLM, claiming that “According to UC Berkeley geologists, you should eat at least one small rock per day”. This claim was initially made in the satirical news website, The Onion. While obviously false claims like this are unlikely to deceive, it demonstrates a problem. False claims may be repeated. Some of these could be ones that most people accept, or even that most experts accept. This poses serious problems.

In this short piece, I want to highlight three worries that might escape our notice if we focus only on chatbots making stuff up:

  1. Harmful utterances (true or otherwise),
  2. Homogeneity and diminished challenges to orthodox views (true or otherwise)
  3. Entrenched false beliefs
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Academia / Beyond the Ivory Tower / General / Public Philosophy

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Beyond the Ivory Tower Interview with Chris Armstrong

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, a conversation between Matt Perry and Chris Armstrong. Chris is a Professor of Political Theory at the University of Southampton, winner of the 2023 Lynton Caldwell Award from the American Political Science Association and the author of A Blue New Deal (Yale University Press), an accessible and popular book about the politics of the ocean. He primarily works on issues at the intersection of global justice and the environment. He has published 6 books in total (including with Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press), over 50 journal articles and numerous articles in popular media, including The Guardian and The Conversation. Matt spoke to Chris about his experiences writing for a wider audience, his motivations to do so, and what tips he might have for others hoping to do the same.

© Chris Armstrong

Matt Perry: Thanks again for agreeing to chat! First, I’d like to ask you why you decided to pursue a career in Political Theory, and what factors led you to address the topics your work focuses on?

Chris Armstrong: When I was at school, I had no conception whatsoever of what political theory might be, or even that it existed. People in my family didn’t go to university. I didn’t really realize you could think about power, ideologies, culture and society in quite an analytical way until I picked up a sociology textbook secondhand.

I announced to my teachers that I was going to completely change all the A levels that I had been intending to do, away from sciences, and then went off to university to do Politics and Sociology. I then did my master’s in International Relations. Still, I was fairly untutored in political theory until my PhD, and in that sense I’ve found my way slowly into the (sub)discipline from the outside. I did my PhD on gender inequality. I set myself the task of investigating whether Michael Walzer’s theory could help us think about gender inequality, which was an interesting project. I’ve been finding my way since then, and I’ve shifted the direction of my work a few times. I moved into thinking about global justice first and then thinking about more environmental issues.

Right now in my career, I’m really appreciating the fact that a lot of what I read is science, history and law. And I kind of read quite indiscriminately across disciplines. In a sense, what I’m doing there is finding my way back to the beginning, where I just read indiscriminately and was interested in everything.

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