In my continued musings about AI and particularly, media coverage of AI, there is a trend I am starting to see that I find a bit disturbing. It bothers my logic brain. There is a quote from the recent Atlantic article What Happens When People Don’t Understand How AI Works that is a good example. (It is a good article, you should read it regardless.)
Many people, however, fail to grasp how large language models work, what their limits are, and, crucially, that LLMs do not think and feel but instead mimic and mirror.
I want to dig into this part: “LLMs do not think and feel but instead mimic and mirror.” I would agree with the second half of the statement, LLMs are statistical models that create new content based on patterns they have picked up from ingesting huge quantities of existing content. I start having a problem with the first part of the statement: “LLMs do not think and feel.” The implication here is that humans think and feel and LLMS do not. In order to determine the truth of that statement, we have to know a few things.
- What is “thinking and feeling”
- Using that definition, do human’s do it?
- Using that definition, do LLM’s do it?
I feel like we fail right out of the gate. What is “thinking” or “feeling”? I honestly don’t know. This is a subject that philosophers have been arguing about for milenia. I think that we neither have a philosophical answer nor a scientific or medical answer to what the heck thinking even is.
So if we don’t know what thinking even is in humans, how can we say one way or another whether LLMs do or do not do it? We actually have a better idea of how LLMs do what they do than we do of how human brains do what they do.
Yet in many articles I read it is just stated as fact that thinking is something humans and only humans can do. I feel like we are jumping the gun on that. Unless we define it as “thinking is an activity that only humans do” which makes it a useless definition in a context where we are discussing humans and non-humans.
I find it hard to accept these arguments until we do a better job defining exactly what thinking and feeling actually are.