Now we’ve got a computer program that would be sociopathic if it were alive. Even when it’s not supposed to, even when it has a way out, even when the truth is known to the computer and it’s easier to spit it out rather than fabricate something—the computer still lies. The implicit effort that’s put in to create a believable facsimile of a source is every bit as deep as the effort to generate an answer in the first place. It’s BS, but it’s exquisite in its detail, a Potemkin village where all the tiniest details are thought of. It’s not that the computer can’t fulfill my request properly—it would have been trivial to program the bot to say that it couldn’t find an external reference for what it was saying—but it simply won’t. This isn’t the unthinking computer servant of old, but something different, something that’s been so optimized for deception that it can’t do anything but deceive its operator.