Comment by MrScruff
14 hours ago
The reason people are confused by LLMs is that they are stochastic parrots. They do an incredibly good job of emulating human behaviours and speech patterns as that's what they've been trained on. But like an actual parrot, it's impossible to say exactly how much conciousness they actually have. I certainly would argue that a parrot is concious, although likely less so than a human.
By "they" do you mean LLMs, or people, or you in particular? Because you're unoriginally parroting a banal thought stopping sequence of tokens that many people have said before without understanding what it means, so it's impossible to say exactly how much conciousness you actually have.
I can't actually figure out what you're reacting to - perhaps you could elaborate?
Try pasting it into an LLM and asking it to explain it to you.
If an LLM can explain what you can't understand, after you literally repeat unoriginal drive-by slogans you heard other people say like "stochastic parrot", without understanding how banal and reductionist and inaccurate that is, or addressing how LLMs actually work and what they can do, then what does that say about you as a human?
By your own reductionist argument, it says you don't actually understand anything, it's just neurons firing.
Are you claiming that parrots can write and debug code, explain mathematics, translate languages, summarize research papers, and engage in extended technical discussions?
Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, His Master's Voice, Golem XIV, The Cyberiad, and his other works describe how humans have a pathological tendency to mistake their own conceptual categories for universal truths. You have identified a mechanism and mistaken it for an explanation.
The term "stochastic parrot" is a slogan masquerading as an explanation, only a shallow surface description of the mechanism, that totally fails to explain the phenomenon, or account for all that LLMs and language itself can do.
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