For me LLMs have been the biggest things since podcasts. Feels almost like gaslighting to read this AI hate here virtually every day as it doesn’t even remotely align with my personal experience of it.

You think you have - but there’s really no way of knowing.

Just because someone writes like a bot doesn’t mean they actually are one. Feeling like “you’ve caught one” doesn’t mean you did - it just means you think you did. You might have been wrong, but you never got confirmation to know for sure, so you have no real basis for judging how good your detection rate actually is. It’s effectively begging the question - using your original assumption as “proof” without actual verification.

And then there’s the classic toupee fallacy: “All toupees look fake - I’ve never seen one that didn’t.” That just means you’re good at spotting bad toupees. You can’t generalize from that and claim you’re good at detecting toupees in general, because all the good ones slip right past you unnoticed.

I hear you - you’re reacting to how people throw around the word “intelligence” in ways that make these systems sound more capable or sentient than they are. If something just stitches words together without understanding, calling it intelligent seems misleading, especially when people treat its output as facts.

But here’s where I think we’re talking past each other: when I say it’s intelligent, I don’t mean it understands anything. I mean it performs a task that normally requires human cognition: generating coherent, human-like language. That’s what qualifies it as intelligent. Not generally so, like a human, but a narrow/weak intelligence. The fact that it often says true things is almost accidental. It’s a side effect of having been trained on a lot of correct information, not the result of human-like understanding.

So yes, it just responds with statistical accuracy but that is intelligent in the technical sense. It’s not understanding. It’s not reasoning. It’s just really good at speaking.

A linear regression model isn’t an AI system.

The term AI didn’t lose its value - people just realized it doesn’t mean what they thought it meant. When a layperson hears “AI,” they usually think AGI, but while AGI is a type of AI, it’s not synonymous with the term.

I’ve had this discussion countless times, and more often than not, people argue that an LLM isn’t intelligent because it hallucinates, confidently makes incorrect statements, or fails at basic logic. But that’s not a failure on the LLM’s part - it’s a mismatch between what the system is and what the user expects it to be.

An LLM isn’t an AGI. It’s a narrowly intelligent system, just like a chess engine. It can perform a task that typically requires human intelligence, but it can only do that one task, and its intelligence doesn’t generalize across multiple independent domains. A chess engine plays chess. An LLM generates natural-sounding language. Both are AI systems and both are intelligent - just not generally intelligent.

What does history have to do with it? We’re talking about the definition of terms - and a machine learning system like an LLM clearly falls within the category of Artificial Intelligence. It’s an artificial system capable of performing a cognitive task that’s normally done by humans: generating language.

The chess opponent on Atari is AI too. I think the issue is that when most people hear “intelligence,” they immediately think of human-level or general intelligence. But an LLM - while intelligent - is only so in a very narrow sense, just like the chess opponent. One’s intelligence is limited to playing chess, and the other’s to generating natural-sounding language.

AI is an extremely broad term which LLMs fall under. You may avoid calling it that but it’s the correct term nevertheless.

You opened with a flat dismissal, followed by a quote from Reddit that didn’t explain why horseshoe theory is wrong - it just mocked it.

From there, you shifted into responding to claims I never made. I didn’t argue that AI is flawless, inevitable, or beyond criticism. I pointed out that reflexive, emotional overreactions to AI are often as irrational as the blind techno-optimism they claim to oppose. That’s the context you ignored.

You then assumed what I must believe, invited yourself to argue against that imagined position, and finished with vague accusations about me “pushing acceptance” of something people “clearly don’t want.” None of that engages with what I actually said.

I often ask ChatGPT for a second opinion, and the responses range from “not helpful” to “good point, I hadn’t thought of that.” It’s hit or miss. But just because half the time the suggestions aren’t helpful doesn’t mean it’s useless. It’s not doing the thinking for me - it’s giving me food for thought.

The problem isn’t taking into consideration what an LLM says - the problem is blindly taking it at its word.

It doesn’t understand things the way humans do, but saying it doesn’t know anything at all isn’t quite accurate either. This thing was trained on the entire internet and your grandma’s diary. You simply don’t absorb that much data without some kind of learning taking place.

It’s not a knowledge machine, but it does have a sort of “world model” that’s emerged from its training data. It “knows” what happens when you throw a stone through a window or put your hand in boiling water. That kind of knowledge isn’t what it was explicitly designed for - it’s a byproduct of being trained on data that contains a lot of correct information.

It’s not as knowledgeable as the AI companies want you to believe - but it’s also not as dumb as the haters want you to believe either.

How is “not understanding things” preventing an LLM from bringing up a point you hadn’t thought of before?

There’s a certain irony in people reacting in an extremely predictable way - spewing hate and criticism the moment someone mentions AI - while seemingly not realizing that they’re reflexively responding to a prompt without any real thought, just like an LLM.

A tool isn’t bad just because it doesn’t do what you thought it would do. You just take that into account and adjust how you use it. Hammer isn’t a scam just because it can’t drive in screws.

Anyone who has an immediate kneejerk reaction the moment someone mentions AI is no better than the people they’re criticizing. Horseshoe theory applies here too - the most vocal AI haters are just as out of touch as the people who treat everything an LLM says as gospel.

Doesn’t get around the fact that telling lonely people to “just go find someone to talk to” is a pretty ignorant thing to say.

Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps, right?

LLM chatbots are designed as echo chambers.

They’re designed to generate natural sounding language. It’s a tool. What you put in is what you get out.

One is 25 €/month and on-demand, and the other costs more than I can afford and would probably be at inconvenient times anyway. Ideal? No, probably not. But it’s better than nothing.

I’m not really looking for advice either - just someone to talk to who at least pretends to be interested.

I doubt it. They just think others do.

Sure - it’s just missing every single one of my friends.