> My own answer is that while some human speech behavior is possibly generated by systems that function in a semantically equivalent way to current LLMs, human cognition is capable of tasks that LLMs cannot perform de novo even if they can give the illusion of doing so (primarily causal chain reasoning). Consequently, LLMs are not in any real sense equivalent to a human being, and using them as such is a mistake.

In the workplace, humans are ultimately a tool to achieve a goal. LLM's don't have to be equivalent to humans to replace a human - they just have to be able to achieve the goal that the human has. 'Human' cognition likely isn't required for a huge amount of the work humans do. Heck, AI probably isn't required to automate a lot of the work that humans do, but it will accelerate how much can be automated and reduce the cost of automation.

So it depends what we mean as 'use them as a human being' - we are using human beings to do tasks, be it solving a billing dispute for a customer, processing a customers insurance claim, or reading through legal discovery. These aren't intrinsically 'human' tasks.

So 2 - yes, I do believe that they operate in a way that makes them useful for tasks. LLM's just respond to text prompts, but those text prompts can do useful things that humans are currently doing.