All philosophical arguments aside, I become immediately skeptical when commentators compare LLMs to watershed moments in human history. Even those moments were

All philosophical arguments aside, I become immediately skeptical when commentators compare LLMs to watershed moments in human history. Even those moments were not known except in hindsight, and the jury is just not in to make these kinds of grand pronouncements. It smells of hype when someone is so desperate to convince everyone else that this is the biggest thing since heliocentrism. Ultimately having an emotional affinity for non-intelligent entities takes even less than text, as anyone who's lost a childhood toy or sold a beloved car can attest. As people we are simply very good at getting attached to other parts of the universe. I also find it perplexing when critics point out the unintelligent nature of LLM behavior, and the response from boosters is to paint human cognition as indistinguishable from statistical word generation. Suffice to say that humans do not maintain a perfect attention set of all previous text input, and even the most superficial introspection should be enough to dispel the idea that we think like this. I saw another article denouncing this pov as nihilism, and while I'm not sure I would go that far, there is something strange about attempting to give AI an undeserved leg up by philosophically reducing people to automatons.