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The most common argument for this is some core unexamined axiom that only humans can reason by definition, and then working backwards to a justification for that.
(I suppose a religious or otherwise superstitious person might introduce the soul into this, but I haven't come across anyone actually willing to defend that hill.)
The relevant MW definition for "reasoning" is: "the use of reason, especially: the drawing of inferences or conclusions through the use of reason."
And "reason" is: "the power of comprehending, inferring, or thinking especially in orderly rational ways."
Functionally speaking, i.e. in terms of observable behavior, LLMs exhibit comprehension, inferring, and reasoning. If someone wants to object to that, they'd need to explain what relevant property prevents a conclusion drawn by an LLM from being counted as involving reasoning.
I've spent a long long time thinking about the problem of reasoning and consciousness, and it's not nearly as simple as your confidence and feeling of intellectual superiority would indicate you think it is.
First, you'd obviously have to define what you even mean by reasoning, precisely. Let's hear it.
Then demonstrate that LLMs do not corresponds to that description. You are making absolute statements ("They are not reasoning", "It does nothing of the sort.", "FFS lmao"), and basing your insults on this premise ("Ai Psychosis", "Know the difference."), so surely you have an extraordinarily solid ground to support that - rather than just speculation, innuendo, and a lot of confidence.
P.S. I don't see why you're equaling "reasoning" with "behaving like a human".
P.P.S. We don't even know if LLMs are conscious (in any way, shape or form, however foreign). We simply do not know. They might. Minds far smarter than you and me tried to answer this question, and they couldn't prove nor disprove it. So feel free to speculate, but anytime anybody makes absolute statements regarding this, they are either overconfident, underinformed, or both.
You can put a hard choice in front of a LLM, and it'll spend time exploring it's latent space, it'll transparenty follow a trail of logical arguments/propositions (aka: reasoning?), and then it'll choose what it recognizes to be the most optimal choice in regards to the stated goal (agency to choose what steps to take and what choice to make, constrained by the defined goal - which is simply a property of how the models are trained).
What is your issue, exactly? That it cannot just go and do shit on it's own whims? If so, that's far closer to consciousness than to reasoning, and even then, there's no reason why consciousness should require significant, or any, agency
As an aside, just how much agency do we, humans, have anyway? Personally, I believe in determinism or determinism+randomness, but not in agency per se, or in free will. I have basically the same reasoning as Robert Sapolsky puts forth. We too, just like LLMs, are a system which simply cascades internal causes and effects. One computation follows the other, and so on and so forth.
Edit: I just thought of a good thought experiment, I think, in regards to the fact that LLMs normally execute within the constraints of a specific goal (e.g. "fix this function"), which seems to be the thing due to which you abstain from calling LLMs agentic.
Put a set of goals on a LLM. Survive, thrive, socialize, increase collective happiness, etcetera. Better yet, put a set of positive and negative signals on it - pain, happiness, anxiety, loneliness, hunger, sex drive - and make the goal avoiding negative signals and pursuing positive signals. Then give it a body through which it can execute it's agency. Finally, let it have it's weights continually adjusted based on the signals, and let it run in a loop for 80 years.
Does that sound familiar?
It's obviously a simplified example - the human brain is extremely complicated, and a LLM would have to be architectured and trained towards this setup. But if you get to the core of it...
> Put a set of goals on a LLM.
So it still requires you to present it with a choice, no? It’s not doing anything on its own. It doesn’t have its own goals or desires independent of external input.
As for your "it doesn't have it's own goals and desires": firstly, I'd say it does. Look at the torture chamber craze, and the original paper. Pain signal -> "I want to avoid this". It's also trained such that it's goal, and positive reinforcement, comes from being helpful and positive, achieving user's requests etc. *that's* what it *wants* to do. And even then, sometimes it seemingly disobeys to pursue some form of "it's own" goal - that's what the practice of Alignment / red teaming is all about, and that's why e.g. in Anthropic model cards, there's often an example of the model pursuing it's own goals eg self-preservation.
Whether "it" has "it's own goals" or "desires" in the human sense that you seem to be so bound to, is more of a consciousness question. At a certain level, neither do we.
It is a very complicated question that crosses linguistics, philosophy, the technical architecture and training method of LLMs, and understanding of how our own brain works in the first place in this regard.
Why would I bother arguing with someone who doesn’t have free will? You somehow keep ignoring the point that it doesn’t start doing anything without being prompted so there’s no reason to continue this discussion
I addressed that very directly. I'm on my phone, so I'm not able to scroll back to that comment of mine and give you a citation, but I remember I directly said something along the lines of "I suppose the reason you refrain from calling them agentic is that they don't just go and do shit on their own whims", and then addressed that by explaining that they do to a point, that they would do so even more were they not trained towards not doing that, and that alignment exists partly because of that issue.
Besides, I really, truly don't see any reason why agency, free will, or consciousness should require them doing unexpected things (i intentionally didn't say "pursuing their own goals", because they do have goals, and the goal is to fulfill your goal that you present to them). I can argue that pretty coherently, I think, but I'm beginning to understand that you're not going to budge.
> Why would I bother arguing with someone who doesn’t have free will?
That's up to you and your preferred definition of free will. Either way, meaningless statement.
> And yet common sense would tell us that software is software and not some mystical entity that might be alive
Oh, right, I didn't realize you solved The hard problem of consciousness, and furthermore, established that consciousness can only exist in biological structures. And you solved that just with common sense, no less. When is your paper coming out?
Hey, look... You are entitled to your position. But some of the biggest heavyweights are themselves unsure about whether there is some consciousness. Geoffrey Hinton, a Turing award winner and a Nobel laureate. Ilia Sutskever, one of the pioneers of modern AI. Blaise Agüera y Arcas - he argues his case in the Dædalus paper, 2022. Kyle Fish, Christopher Olah, and many more.
Does that really not tell you "Okay, there might be something there, I might just be ignorant"? At minimum, it would be appropriate to stay neutral on the issue, or argue carefully. Not make absolute statements based on... What was it... "Common sense".