Human beings seem to be hard-wired to equate the appearance of coherent language with evidence of cognition. Even on Hacker News, where people should know bette

Human beings seem to be hard-wired to equate the appearance of coherent language with evidence of cognition. Even on Hacker News, where people should know better, a lot people seem to believe LLMs are literally sentient and self aware, not simply equivalent to but surpassing human capabilities in every dimension. I mean, I know a lot of that is simply the financial incentives of people whose job it is to push the Overton window of LLMs being recognized as legal beings equivalent to humans so that their training data is no longer subject to claims of copyright infringement (because it's simply "learning as a human mind would") but it also seems there's a deep seated human biological imperative being hacked here. The sociology behind the way people react to LLMs is fascinating.