In 2013, Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel came up with the idea for his LIEBOT, also known as Lügenbot. On September 11, 2013, he published an article titled “Der Lügenbot und andere Münchhausen-Maschinen” in the magazine CyberPress. More articles and contributions followed until a prototype was implemented in 2016. Kevin Schwegler, then a student of the philosopher of technology, was responsible for this work. He developed a chatbot that transformed truthful statements into false ones using seven different strategies. In the summer of 2016, for example, LIEBOT claimed that Donald Trump was the President of the United States. To make this statement, it had used information from Yahoo in a multi-step process. The results of the project were documented in a paper titled “Towards Kant Machines” and presented in March 2017 at the AAAI Spring Symposia at Stanford University. One might argue that LIEBOT does not have intentions of its own and therefore does not lie in the strict sense. However, this intent was programmed into it. In a way, it lies on behalf of its creators. With this project, Oliver Bendel wanted to demonstrate that it is possible to build dialogue systems capable of spreading falsehoods. Today, such systems seem to be omnipresent in the form of LLMs. However, one has to look closely to discern the differences. In his book “300 Keywords Generative KI”, Oliver Bendel writes: “Hallucinating machines do not necessarily qualify as Munchausen machines in the strict sense, since there is no intent – or at least intent can hardly be proven.” Manipulated LLM-based chatbots, on the other hand, come very close to LIEBOT. ChatGPT and similar systems pursue a political agenda and exhibit an ideological tendency.
BY OLIVER BENDEL
