Lars Erik Holmquist and Sam Nemeth will be presenting the Late Breaking Work “Don’t believe anything I tell you, it’s all lies!”: A Synthetic Ethnography on Untruth in Large Language Models at CHI 2025, the ACM SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI is the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction.
The
short paper applies the new method
synthetic ethnography to present three case studies of how Large Language Models (LLMs) present untruth. We observed the behaviour of different LLMs talking about verifiable facts, and found that when they reached the edge of their knowledge base, they just went on talking (what Hicks et al. called “bullshitting”). We believe that although it is problematic, this capacity to “fill in” is also part of what makes LLMs and other forms of generative AI so useful. However, currently the interfaces fail to give the user an understanding of the model’s limitations, and therefore we argue that LLMs should be designed so that they can “lie gracefully” – continuing to do what they do best, while making it possible for the user to work with them to avoid dangerous untruths.
Also at CHI, Lars Erik Holmquist will present the paper
Liberated Pixels and Virtual Production: A Framework and a Test Case for XR Beyond Glasses at the workshop
Beyond Glasses: Future Directions for XR Interactions within the Physical World. The paper argues that virtual production (
such the VP studio as at NTU's new DaDA building) presents a perfect environment for developing novel extended reality (XR) applications, and proposes a new framework for XR beyond glasses, called Liberated Pixels.
CHI 2025 takes place in Yokohama, Japan, at the PACIFICO Yokohama from 26 April to 1 May 2025, while also supporting remote attendance. Hope to see you there!
