cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/33174237
By Zeynep Tufekci - Opinion Columnist
July 11, 2025We all somehow adjusted to the fact that machines can now produce complex, coherent, conversational language. But that ability makes it extremely hard not to think about L.L.M.s as possessing a form of humanlike intelligence.
They are not, however, a version of human intelligence. Nor are they truth seekers or reasoning machines. What they are is plausibility engines. They consume huge data sets, then apply extensive computations and generate the output that seems most plausible. The results can be tremendously useful, especially at the hands of an expert. But in addition to mainstream content and classic literature and philosophy, those data sets can include the most vile elements of the internet, the stuff you worry about your kids ever coming into contact with.
LLMs are just massively-multidimensional maps of human language use. It is academically interesting to have developed both the map and a method for plotting a course through language-space using a prompt as an initial vector, but human intellience is not in language. Rather, language is part of human intelligence, and mapping it to ever more computationally-expensive distances is never going to chart a path to the digital mind that all the tech billionaires are so desperate to enslave.