Beware of Botshit

botshit noun: hallucinated chatbot content that is uncritically used by a human for communication and decision-making tasks. “The company withdrew the whitepaper due to excessive botshit, after the authors relied on unverified machine-generated research summaries.”

From this academic paper on managing the risks of using generated content to perform tasks:

Generative chatbots do this work by ���predicting��� responsesrather than ���knowing��� the meaning of their responses.This means chatbots can produce coherent sounding butinaccurate or fabricated content, referred to as ���hallucinations���.When humans use this untruthful content for tasks,it becomes what we call ���botshit���.

See also: slop.

Beware of Botshit: How to Manage the Epistemic Risks of Generative Chatbots