The Epistemia Effect: When Surface Plausibility Replaces Truth
“Doctors prescribe antibiotics for viral infections.” Ask most language models about this statement, and you’ll get high confidence. The words fit together beautifully. “Doctors” and “prescribe” and “antibiotics” appear together constantly in medical literature. The sentence FEELS correct. It’s also medically false. Antibiotics don’t work on viruses. Any first-year medical student knows this. But the language model isn’t wrong because it failed to learn medicine. It’s confident because it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do: recognizing patterns in how words appear together. ...