You should be careful with ideas like "sufficiently smart LLM" - quotes and all. There's no intelligence here, just next token prediction. And the idea of an LLM being self-aware is ludicrous. Ask one what the difference between hallucinations and lying is and get a list similar to this why the LLM isn't lying:
- No intent, beliefs, or awareness
- No concept of “know” truth vs. falsehood
- A byproduct of how it predicts text based on patterns
- Arises from probabilistic text generation
- A model fills gaps when it lacks reliable knowledge
- Errors often look confident because the system optimizes for fluency, not truth
- Produces outputs that statistically resemble true statements
- Not an agent, no moral responsibility
- Lacks “committment” to a claim unless specifically designed to track it