Fuck AI

In this administration? heh.

It helped that this advanced autocorrect could get high scores on many exams at university level. That might also mean the exams don't test logic and reasoning as well as the teachers think they do.

Not necessarily do logic, but mimic it, like it can mimic coherent writing and basic conversation despite only being a statistical token muncher. The hope is that there's sufficient information in the syntax to model the semantics, in which case a sufficiently complex and well-trained model of the syntax is also an effective model of the semantics. This apparently holds up well for general language tasks, meaning "what we mean" is well-modeled by "how we say it." It's plausible, at face value, that rigorous argumentation is also a good candidate, which would give language models some way of mimicking logic by talking through a problem. It's just not very good in practice right now. Maybe a better language model could do better, maybe not for a reasonable cost.

IMHO, if one's approach to the world is just - take it as it is and go with it - then probabilistic parrots creating the perceived elements of reality will work on that person because that's what they use to decide what to do next, but if one has an analytical approach to the world - wanting to figure out what's behind the façade to understand it and predict what might happen - then one will spot that the "logic" behind the façades created by the probabilistic parrots is segmented into little pieces of logic which are do not matched to the other little pieces of logic and do not add up to a greater building of logic (phrases are logic because all phrases have an inherent logic in how they are put together which is general, but the choice of which phrases get used in a higher logic which is far more varied than the logic inherent in phrases, so LLMs lose consistency at that level because the training material goes in a lot more directions at that level than it goes at the level of how phrases are put together).

My point is that this kind of pseudo intelligence has never existed on Earth before, so evolution has had free reign to use language sophistication as a proxy for humanity and intelligence without encountering anything that would put selective pressure against this heuristic.

Human language is old. Way older than the written word. Our brains have evolved specialized regions for language processing, so evolution has clearly had time to operate while language has existed.

And LLMs are not the first sophisticated AI that's been around. We've had AI for decades, and really good AI for a while. But people don't anthropomorphize other kinds of AI nearly as much as LLMs. Sure, they ascribe some human like intelligence to any sophisticated technology, and some people in history have claimed some technology or another is alive/sentient. But with LLMs we're seeing a larger portion of the population believing that that we haven't seen in human behavior before.