In my post about people who think LLMs are intelligent, I said that I think that these people are like the people who trust TV news commentators or newspapers. But people who actually trust those are largely people who hate “AI” and want to destroy it, datacenters, 5G, and frequently Republicans. These are not at all the people claiming that LLMs are intelligent and humans are obsolete. So how do I reconcile this?

I think it’s useful to distinguish between a fundamental mistake and the expression of it. A fundamental mistake is something like blindly trusting an authority. The expression of it is which authority is blindly trusted.

To give an example of what I mean, take people who unquestioningly trusted mainstream doctors until they were completely failed by mainstream medicine, who then became devotes of alternative medicine. They haven’t really changed their attitude—they are still unquestioningly trusting an authority—they’ve just switched which authority they unquestioningly trust.

You can also see this same phenomenon fairly often in people who reject mainstream news media only to assume everything some new media outlet tells them must be true. You can also see it in people who bounce from one love affair to another, always sure that this time they’ve found “the one”.

It’s not that the people who think LLMs are intelligent also blindly trust news commentators. In fact, they’re highly like to not, because you can only serve one master. They’re just the kind of person who, under different circumstances, would blindly trust news commentators.