"Cognitive fluency is the subjective experience of ease or difficulty in mental processing. When information comes to us smoothly, we judge it as more truthful, more intelligent, more credible. It's why familiar statements feel truer than novel ones, why clear fonts are more persuasive than obscured text, and why rhyming aphorisms seem wiser than their non-rhyming equivalents. Our brains use processing ease as a heuristic for validity, a mental shortcut that usually serves us well."
"Large language models produce text with superhuman fluency, coherent, confident, beautifully structured prose that reads like expertise. These systems excel at linguistic plausibility: the art of sounding right without necessarily being right, which rolls out the red carpet for "epistemia", a structural condition in which linguistic smoothness substitutes for genuine epistemic evaluation. The mechanism is insidious. LLMs don't form beliefs, verify facts, or revise claims based on evidence."
Cognitive fluency biases people to judge smoothly presented information as more truthful, intelligent, and credible. Familiar phrasing, clear presentation, and rhetorical polish exploit this heuristic and make statements feel more valid. Large language models generate highly fluent, authoritative-sounding prose without forming beliefs, verifying facts, or updating claims. These models perform pattern completion over statistical language graphs, producing plausible but potentially false assertions. Linguistic smoothness can thus substitute for genuine epistemic evaluation, creating epistemia and inducing unwarranted confidence that reduces critical scrutiny and careful judgment.
Read at Psychology Today
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