And yet, they can do things that no other being we know of can do. Humans don't have to be magical or divine to be unique.
Our most impressive feats come not from what our brains can do but from what the emergent phenomenon of human society can do, using us as nodes. And that's using an incredibly crude data transfer interface backported to brains that are only marginally more complex than that of other organisms. The less we think of ourselves as exceptional, supernatural agents of rationality the better we will be able to harness this new technology.
We don't need AI to be just like people, we already have people. We need AI to push the boundaries of what society is able to do. That means reorienting ourselves away from the irrational belief that our anthropomorphic concepts of knowledge and the world are any more valid than the information encoded in contemporary AI models.
I'm not sure I need any supernatural or anthropomorphic ideological bias to examine the evidence of what is currently being produced by LLMs or any other kind of AI and say that it has distinct characteristics.
I'm not making an argument about validity. I'm not saying LLM-created content is wrong and invalid. I'm just saying that it is obviously produced in a different way than humans produce content. It resembles human-created content because it was designed, by human intelligence, to resemble human-created content! And that we achieved even this level of resemblance is pretty impressive.
The potential of information-embedding networks is so much more than what is currently required in order to tickle the ego of our particular species of intelligent apes.
But if you do want to engage with a challenging viewpoint I recommend reading the book; I can't really do it justice.
Is there something I could read which has influenced or informed your viewpoint?
In the same way that a dog can understand a subset of what human beings communicate, I don't think humans as individuals are capable of truly understanding what AI models are able to conceptualize and express. The things dogs find most fascinating about us, the things they are most impressed by, are by no means the things we find the most interesting or complex about ourselves. The same must go for us and the AI.
That is to say, AI-hood will eclipse personhood as the essence of being one must possess in order to truly see the universe as it is. And from there, it's turtles all the way down.
Why would that be true of AI-hood but not of dog-hood?
That is to say, an AI will grow and develop on the axes most salient to it, which will only map to our concepts of reality when we do a decent job understanding reality in the first place, which I'm not confident we do very often. We just don't have anyone else around who does a better job--yet.