Perspectivist

The chess opponent on Atari is AI too. I think the issue is that when most people hear "intelligence," they immediately think of human-level or general intelligence. But an LLM - while intelligent - is only so in a very narrow sense, just like the chess opponent. One’s intelligence is limited to playing chess, and the other’s to generating natural-sounding language.

AI is an extremely broad term which LLMs falls under. You may avoid calling it that but it's the correct term nevertheless.

You opened with a flat dismissal, followed by a quote from Reddit that didn’t explain why horseshoe theory is wrong - it just mocked it.

From there, you shifted into responding to claims I never made. I didn’t argue that AI is flawless, inevitable, or beyond criticism. I pointed out that reflexive, emotional overreactions to AI are often as irrational as the blind techno-optimism they claim to oppose. That’s the context you ignored.

You then assumed what I must believe, invited yourself to argue against that imagined position, and finished with vague accusations about me “pushing acceptance” of something people “clearly don’t want.” None of that engages with what I actually said.

I often ask ChatGPT for a second opinion, and the responses range from “not helpful” to “good point, I hadn’t thought of that.” It’s hit or miss. But just because half the time the suggestions aren’t helpful doesn’t mean it’s useless. It’s not doing the thinking for me - it’s giving me food for thought.

The problem isn’t taking into consideration what an LLM says - the problem is blindly taking it at its word.

It doesn’t understand things the way humans do, but saying it doesn’t know anything at all isn’t quite accurate either. This thing was trained on the entire internet and your grandma’s diary. You simply don’t absorb that much data without some kind of learning taking place.

It’s not a knowledge machine, but it does have a sort of “world model” that’s emerged from its training data. It “knows” what happens when you throw a stone through a window or put your hand in boiling water. That kind of knowledge isn’t what it was explicitly designed for - it’s a byproduct of being trained on data that contains a lot of correct information.

It’s not as knowledgeable as the AI companies want you to believe - but it’s also not as dumb as the haters want you to believe either.

How is "not understanding things" preventing an LLM from bringing up a point you hadn't thought of before?

There’s a certain irony in people reacting in an extremely predictable way - spewing hate and criticism the moment someone mentions AI - while seemingly not realizing that they’re reflexively responding to a prompt without any real thought, just like an LLM.

A tool isn’t bad just because it doesn’t do what you thought it would do. You just take that into account and adjust how you use it. Hammer isn't a scam just because it can't drive in screws.

Anyone who has an immediate kneejerk reaction the moment someone mentions AI is no better than the people they’re criticizing. Horseshoe theory applies here too - the most vocal AI haters are just as out of touch as the people who treat everything an LLM says as gospel.

Here's the part that covers it.

In case you're curious about what would be the last remaining structures left on earth after everything else has been ground to dust:

I too think that the people who like things that I don't are stupid.

I use ChatGPT every single day, and I find it both extremely useful and entertaining.

I mainly use it to help edit longer messages, bounce ideas around, and share random thoughts I know my friends wouldn’t be interested in. Honestly, it also has pretty much replaced Google for me.

I basically think of it as a friend who’s really knowledgeable across a wide range of topics, excellent at writing, and far more civil than most people I run into online - but who’s also a bit delusional at times and occasionally talks out of their ass, which is why I can’t ever fully trust it. That said, it’s still a great first stop when I’m trying to solve a problem.