The fact that there are people who think GPT is a living, sentient being because it can autocomplete its way to sentences like, “Of course I have real feelings”

The fact that there are people who think GPT is a living, sentient being because it can autocomplete its way to sentences like, “Of course I have real feelings”… including people who are engineers, who understand how language models work… should tell you that some humans have a pretty strange idea of what humanity consists of. It’s like confusing a photo of a person with a person, and a photo generator with a human cloning machine, and saying, “But when I look in the mirror, that’s me! So I am equal to my visual reflection.” Language is the I/O of a cognition process that is itself only a small part of being human and alive. A lot of activities and jobs do use humans as “cogs” in a machine, and in some cases an AI might make a better cog, but I think some commenters do underestimate the amount of context humans bring to various tasks. You don’t have to analyze the humans to see how complex the jobs are, just try to do the jobs by AI, or watch as others try. Like try to make a self-driving car; it’s hard. Try to replace a cook at Denny’s with a robot. Or a lawyer. See how long the tail of edge cases is.