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.
Things were different during the pandemic because there was a real risk of vastly overwhelming the healthcare system. Airborne diseases never went away, but the difference is that if you catch one now, you can get treated - which wasn’t always the case back then. That's why we urged people to wear masks and get vaccinated; that we all wouldn't get sick at the same time.
I think a huge issue online is just how incredibly mean people can be to each other - and the fact that they don’t even see themselves as mean. They’ve built a story around how their behavior is justified, so they keep doing it, completely oblivious to the fact that they’re part of the problem.
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.
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.
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.
I use ChatGPT every single day, and I find it both extremely useful and entertaining.
I mainly use it to help edit longer messages, bounce ideas around, and share random thoughts I know my friends wouldn’t be interested in. Honestly, it also has pretty much replaced Google for me.
I basically think of it as a friend who’s really knowledgeable across a wide range of topics, excellent at writing, and far more civil than most people I run into online - but who’s also a bit delusional at times and occasionally talks out of their ass, which is why I can’t ever fully trust it. That said, it’s still a great first stop when I’m trying to solve a problem.
I’m not questioning whether such actors exist - I’m questioning why anyone would waste their time on a platform as tiny as Lemmy. Even if they were successful, the number of people they could sway here is minuscule. That time and effort would be far better spent on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, where the reach is exponentially greater.
I also question people’s ability to detect these actors in the first place. The common assumption seems to be that they’re pushing unpopular opinions that go against your beliefs - but I don’t think that’s their strategy. It seems far more effective to infiltrate echo chambers and feed the narrative within them, reinforcing the beliefs people already hold. That naturally escalates tensions with those in opposing camps, whose beliefs have also been artificially amplified.
I don’t think the main goal is to spread a specific worldview - it’s to sow chaos, distrust, and push society toward implosion from the inside.
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.