The LLM is glorified data product.
Humans may not have many original thoughts, but the thoughts that they arrive at are the product of (at least partially) independent processes.
An LLM is constructed. It no more had its own thoughts than a physical book has written its own story.
We're just going one step back. Instead of picking up a book, we're picking up a book generator. A book generator that was created from scanning in a bunch of books. All those books have authors and the book generator has essentially been authored by that collection of authors.
The book generator can very convincingly tell me what it is like to be a parent, in every way, but all it's doing is regurgitating data. It's never been a parent, it will never be a parent, it has never held a child or even experienced a single emotion. The word "parent" is just a collection of tokens. It's not a label that it uses to make sense of its experience, or other llms experience, of reality.
It's just an overly elaborate chinese room.
Humans may not have many original thoughts, but the thoughts that they arrive at are the product of (at least partially) independent processes.
An LLM is constructed. It no more had its own thoughts than a physical book has written its own story.
We're just going one step back. Instead of picking up a book, we're picking up a book generator. A book generator that was created from scanning in a bunch of books. All those books have authors and the book generator has essentially been authored by that collection of authors.
The book generator can very convincingly tell me what it is like to be a parent, in every way, but all it's doing is regurgitating data. It's never been a parent, it will never be a parent, it has never held a child or even experienced a single emotion. The word "parent" is just a collection of tokens. It's not a label that it uses to make sense of its experience, or other llms experience, of reality.
It's just an overly elaborate chinese room.