[tovej]

LLM's have not "read" social science research and they do not "know" about the outcomes, they have been trained to replicate the exact text of social science articles.

The articles will not be mutually consistent, and what output the LLM produces will therefore depend on what article the prompt most resembles in vector space and which numbers the RNG happens to produce on any particular prompt.

[kremi]

« Connaître est reconnaître »

I don’t think essentialist explanations about how LLMs work are very helpful. It doesn’t give any meaningful explanation of the high level nature of the pattern matching that LLMs are capable of. And it draws a dichotomic line between basic pattern matching and knowledge and reasoning, when it is much more complex than that.

[tovej]

It's especially important not to antropomorphise when there is a risk people actually mistake something for a humanlike being.

What is least helpful is using misleading terms like this, because it makes reasoning about this more difficult. If we assume the model "knows" something, we might reasonably assume it will always act according to that knowledge. That's not true for an LLM, so it's a term that should clearly be a oided.