LLMs don’t have a purpose. They are methods. Saying LLMs lie is like saying a recipe will give you food poisoning. It misses a step (cooking in the analogy). That step is part of critical thinking.
A person using an LLM’s output is the one who lies. The LLM “generates falsehoods”, “creates false responses”, “models inaccurate details”, “writes authoritatively without sound factual basis”. All these descriptions are better at describing what the llm is doing than “lying”.
Staying that they lie puts too much emphasis on the likelihood of this when LLMs can be coerced into producing accurate useful information with some effort.
Yes it’s important to build a culture of not believing what you read, but that’s an important thing to do regardless of the source, not just because it’s an LLM. I’m much more concerned about people’s ability to intentionally generate mistruths than I am of AI.