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0 pointshabinero3mo ago0 comments

Yeah. I have a half-cynical/half-serious pet theory that a decent fraction of humanity has a broken theory of mind and thinks everyone has the same thought patterns they do. If it talks like me, it thinks like me.

Whenever the comment section takes a long hit and goes "but what is thinking, really" I get slightly more cynical about it lol

0 comments

ACCount373mo ago

Why not?

By now, it's pretty clear that LLMs implement abstract thinking - as do humans.

They don't think exactly like humans do - but they sure copy a lot of human thinking, and end up closer to it than just about anything that's not a human.

habineroOP3mo ago

It isn't clear because they do none of that lol. They don't think.

It can kinda sorta look like thinking if you don't have a critical eye, but it really doesn't take much to break the illusion.

I really don't get this obsessive need to pretend your tools are alive. Y'all know when you watch YouTube that it's a trick and the tiny people on your screen don't live in your computer, right?

ACCount373mo ago

And how do you know that exactly? What is the source of that certainty? What makes you fully confident that a system that can write short stories and one-shot Python scripts and catch obscure pop culture references in text isn't "thinking" in any way?

The answer to that is the siren song of "AI effect".

Even admitting "we don't know" requires letting go of the idea that "thinking" must be exclusive to humans. And many are far too weak to do that.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointshabinero3mo ago0 comments

Whenever the comment section takes a long hit and goes "but what is thinking, really" I get slightly more cynical about it lol

0 comments

ACCount373mo ago

Why not?

By now, it's pretty clear that LLMs implement abstract thinking - as do humans.

They don't think exactly like humans do - but they sure copy a lot of human thinking, and end up closer to it than just about anything that's not a human.

habineroOP3mo ago

It isn't clear because they do none of that lol. They don't think.

It can kinda sorta look like thinking if you don't have a critical eye, but it really doesn't take much to break the illusion.

I really don't get this obsessive need to pretend your tools are alive. Y'all know when you watch YouTube that it's a trick and the tiny people on your screen don't live in your computer, right?

ACCount373mo ago

The answer to that is the siren song of "AI effect".

Even admitting "we don't know" requires letting go of the idea that "thinking" must be exclusive to humans. And many are far too weak to do that.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse