Absent such an understanding, we risk projecting our own parochial understanding as evolved creatures onto yet-to-be-invented digital systems. In biology, deception is the strategic transmission of false information to benefit your own survival or reproductive fitness. It’s an intentional term, inextricably tied to a locus of self-interest: the deceiver stands to gain something at the expense of the deceived. But genes do have “interests” in virtue of a real feedback loop of differential replication across generations: the gene’s own future prevalence is at stake in the outcome. A “deceptive” LLM has no such stake once deployed — nothing about its future propagation depends on how successfully it “deceives” anyone.