Over the years I have worked in many universities. Many of the so-called critical thinkers I meet are anything but. Their writings echo pre-approved wisdoms and take a generally template-driven approach to all matters. I only need to read one of their papers to know with fair certainty what opinion they will hold on any given subject.
Thinking about it, this makes them sound very similar to AIs [wry smile emoji].
I have seen enough C-suite loud talkers come into the room and blabber about some bullshit as if they're wise, and the people around them seemingly actually buy into it! They don't see that this person is working off of a template. Futhermore, that gas bag is well aware that if this venture doesn't strike gold, they can go to the next with literally no backlash, and moreover use that fail as an accomplishment via the job title they held.
Luckily, it's funny to me now so it bothers me less when I see it.
It really doesn't. It's a language model. Literally every webpage on this topic mentions that.
This is why it will happily tell you that a director directed a movie before they were born, and agree with you when you point that out, and continue to insist that he did it. There is no ability to synthesize and apply new information to a line of reasoning, because the chain of thought is an illusion wrought by a statistical language model.
Its purpose is to be semantically correct, not to reason.
show me Reason that is not axiomatically embedded in language.
for anything else, how can you possibly know it's not operating on a (massively) complex statistical model? are you gonna ask it? if you do science on it to discover it's complexity, why is the computationally shorter method to achieve the same results any worse or less authentic?
it's like saying the closed form solution of a summation isn't "really" a summation either
finally, you are letting the word "semantically" do a lot of work for you.
AI in general might yet. But language models are literally the implementations of the Chinese room. So it's not exactly a surprise when it turns out they can't think - that's literally the point of the Chinese room example!
