Comment by AIPedant

No, I think a non-sentient AI which is much more advanced than GPT could lie - I never said sentience, and the example I gave involved a monkey, which is sentient. The problem is transformer ANNs themselves are too stupid to lie.

In 2023 OpenAI co-authored an excellent paper on LLMs disseminating conspiracy theories - sorry, don't have the link handy. But a result that stuck with me: if you train a bidirectional transformer LLM where half the information about 9/11 is honest and half is conspiracy theories, it has a 50-50 chance of telling you one or the other if you ask about 9/11. It is not smart enough to tell there is an inconsistency. This extends to reasoning traces vs its "explanations": it does not understand its own reasoning steps and is not smart enough to notice if the explanation is inconsistent.