To lie, you have to know that you are not telling the truth, and arguably have to be able to held accountable for that action.
It's easy to babble a series of untruths, but lying requires intention, which requires an entity that can be recognized as having intentions.
I'd argue that ChatGPT's lack of a cohesive self prevents it from lying, no matter how many untruths it creates.
Words and their historical contexts aside, systems which are based on optimization can take actions which can appear like intermediate lying to us. When deepmind used to play those atari games - the agents started cheating but that was just optimisation wasn't it? similarly when a language based agent does a optimisation, what we might perceive it as is scheming/lying.
I will start believing that LLM is self aware when a research paper from a top lab like Deepmind/Anthropic put such a paper in a peer reviewed journal. Otherwise, it's just matrix multiplication to me so far.
IMO a much better framing is that the system was able to autocomplete stories/play-scripts. The document was already set up to contain a character that was a smart computer program with coincidentally the same name.
Then humans trick themselves into thinking the puppet-play is a conversation with the author.
It's kind of like a manufacturer of Ouija boards promising that they'll fix the "channeling the wrong spirits from beyond the mortal plane" problem. It falsely suggests that "normal" output is fundamentally different.
