[systemerror]

I really can't tell to be honest, so if it's satire it's very good. If it's not then I don't really know what it's saying, humans are bad at stuff too? Many humans are not well educated and are not great conversationalists? Does this somehow make LLMs better in our perspective somehow?

[BugsJustFindMe]

If it were satire, what do you think it would be satirizing?

> I don't really know what it's saying

It's saying that complaints about deficiencies in LLMs, about a fundamental lack of LLM intelligence, about how LLMs are just statistical machines and not really thinking, about how LLMs are incapable of learning from past experiences, about how LLMs lack any coherent epistemology ignore how very deficient humans are in many same exact ways.

> Does this somehow make LLMs better in our perspective somehow?

Better is a relative measure not an absolute one, so possibly, because views of LLMs are inherently formed in relation to views of the human brains they're modeling.

[staticman2]

>about how LLMs are just statistical machines and not really thinking,

I don't think the article said anything about statistics?

This seems to be a sort of Rorchasch test but looking at it again:

>This does not bode well for my interest in meeting new people

It really does seem to me the article is making fun of people who think this sort of article is on point.

There's a genre of satire where the joke is that it makes you ask "Who the heck is the sort of person who would write this?"

It could fit in that genre but of course I could be wrong.

[BugsJustFindMe]

> I don't think the article said anything about statistics?

I don't think I said or implied that it did. It's merely one of the many positions that people commonly (and defensively) take for why LLMs aren't and/or can't be intelligent like humans, ignoring that humans exhibit exactly the same patterns.

[tart-lemonade]

> If it were satire, what do you think it would be satirizing?

Think of the most terminally online drama you've ever witnessed: the hysterics people work themselves into over what (to outside observers) seems utterly inane and forgettable, the multi-page Tumblr or 4chan posts that become the sacred texts of the "discourse", and the outsized importance people ascribe to it, as if some meme, album cover, or Qanon drop is the modern incantation of the shot heard around the world.

The people wrapped up in this stuff tend to self-select into their own communities because if you're not involved with or amenable to caring about it, why should they spend time talking to someone who will just nod, go "huh, that's wild", and proceed to steer the conversation elsewhere? In their eyes, you may even be a weirdo for not caring about this stuff.

So when I read:

> I’ve got a lot of interests and on any given day, I may be excited to discuss various topics, from kernels to music to cultures and religions. I know I can put together a prompt to give any of today’s leading models and am essentially guaranteed a fresh perspective on the topic of interest. But let me pose the same prompt to people and more often then not the reply will be a polite nod accompanied by clear signs of their thinking something else entirely, or maybe just a summary of the prompt itself, or vague general statements about how things should be. In fact, so rare it is to find someone who knows what I mean that it feels like a magic moment. With the proliferation of genuinely good models—well educated, as it were—finding a conversational partner with a good foundation of shared knowledge has become trivial with AI. This does not bode well for my interest in meeting new people.

I'm imagining the more academic equivalent of someone who got wrapped up in Tiktok drama or Q nuttery but couldn't find a community of kindred souls and, frustrated with the perceived intellectual mediocrity surrounding themself, has embraced LLMs for connection instead. And that's just hilarious. If Silicon Valley was still being produced, I'm sure this would have been made into an episode at some point.

The bits about not generalizing and engaging in fallacious reasoning are also quite amusing since, while yes, the average person likely would benefit from taking (and paying attention in) a couple introductory philosophy classes, expecting all humans to behave logically and introspectively is fantastical thinking.

[BugsJustFindMe]

> expecting all humans to behave logically and introspectively is fantastical thinking

Yes, that is exactly the point of OP's post, that humans are on average quite bad at behaving logically and introspectively and exhibit the very same behaviors that we righteously fault AI for doing. And then OP provides a list of faulty human behaviors that are the same faulty behaviors people give as demonstrating that AI lacks true intelligence.

Meanwhile, AI continues to improve and the human species does not.

And the conclusion is that the fact that the rise of AI has made human faulty behaviors more apparent may creepingly tear at the social fabric.

Read the first paragraph again. It sets the framing through which the rest of the post is understood (as first paragraphs tend to do).

I find this exchange to be a funny example of the truth of OP's list, where the part which sticks with you is some finer detail of one of the examples while the thesis statement itself, the very explanation of the overarching point of the post, seems to have fallen outside of the context window.

[empath75]

The point is that if you have benchmarks for intelligence, which humans would also fail, then you have to concede that either humans are not intelligent, or that the benchmarks are too strict, or aren't a measure for intelligence at all.

[allears]

The thing is, LLMs would fail that test every time, but humans would pass it most of the time (hopefully). Just because humans are fallible doesn't make LLMs intelligent.

We really haven't got a grip on what intelligence actually is, but it seems that humans and LLMs aren't really in the same ballpark, or even the same league.

[pixl97]

>haven't got a grip on what intelligence actually is

Because intelligence isn't a thing, it's a bunch of different things that some intelligent things have more or less (or none of).

This is why measures of intelligence always fail because we try to binary it which doesn't work. Intelligence is spikey. Intelligence scales from very small and dumb to very smart. But even the things that are very smart on a lot of things still do very dumb things. We also measure human intelligence as a function of all humans and LLM intelligence on a particular model.

So yea, this is why nothing seems to make sense.