this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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Seriously the sheer amount of people that equate coherent speech with sentience is mind boggling.
All jokes aside, I have heard some decently educated technical people say “yeah, it’s really creepy that it put a random laugh in what it said” or “it broke the 4th wall when talking”… it’s fucking programmed to do that and you just walked right in to it.
Technical term is the ELIZA effect.
In 1966, Professor Weizenbaum made a chatbot called ELIZA that essentially repeats what you say back in different terms.
He then noticed by accident that people keep convincing themselves it's fucking concious.
"I had not realized ... that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people."
- Prof. Weizenbaum on ELIZA.
Of course it's creepy. Why wouldn't it be? Someone programmed it to do that, or programmed it in such a way that it weighted those additions. That's weird.
The difference is knowledge. You know what an apple is. A LLM does not. It has training data that has the word apple is associated with the words red, green, pie, and doctor.
The model then uses a random number generator to mix those words up a bit, and see if the result looks a bit like the training data, and if it does, the model spits out a sequence of words that may or may not be a sentence, depending on the size and quality of the training data.
At no point is any actual meaning associated with any of the words. The model is just trying to fit different shaped blocks through different shaped holes, and sometimes everything goes through the square hole, and you get hallucinations.
You think you are saying things which proves you are knowledgeable on this topic, but you are not.
The human brain is not a computer. And any comparisons between the two are wildly simplistic and likely to introduce more error than meaning into the discourse.
The human brain is exactly like an organic highly parallel computer system using convolution system just like ai models. It's just way more complex. We know how synapses work. We know the form of grey matter. It's too complex for us to model it all artificially at this point, but there's nothing indicating it requires a magical function to make it work.
What is this whole "human beings are special and have a soul?". You happen to experience things you "feel", that's it. Everything else is just like a specialized computer, shapped by nature to act in a certain way.
If you think you can hand-wave consciousness, self-awareness, sentience, and qualia away in a tossed-off social media post, good luck with that. 🤣
I don't possess conscious experience and even I think this whole thread is crap.
If you say that all your statements and beliefs are a slurry of weighted averages depending on how often you’ve seen something without any thought or analysis involved, I will believe you 🤷♂️
I encourage you to try to find and cite any reputable neuroscientist that believes we can even quantify what thought is, much less believes both A) we ‘know the basic fundamentals of how brains work’ and B) it’s just like an LLM.
Your argument isn’t a line of reasoning invented by neuroscientists, it’s one invented by people who need to sell more AI processors. I know which group I think has a better handle on the brain.
I never said it's directly like an Ilm. That's a very specific form. The brain has many different structures - and the neural interconnections we can map have been shown to be a form of convolution in much the same way that many ai systems use (not by coincidence). Scientists generally avoid metaphysics like subjects of consciousness because it's inherently unprovable. We can look at the results of processing/thought and quantify the complexity and accuracy. We do this for children at various ages and can see how they learn to think in increasing complexity. We can do this for ai systems too. The leaps that we've seen over the last few years as computational power of computers has reached some threshold, show emergent abilities that only a decade ago were thought to be impossible. Since we can never know anyone else's experience, we can only go on input/output. And so if it looks like intelligence, then it is intelligence. Then the concept of 'thought' in this context is only semantics. There is, so far, nothing to suggest that magic is needed for our brains to think; it's just a physical process - so as we add more complexity and different structures to ai systems, there's no reason to think we can't make them do the same as our brains, or more.
Immediate mark of a someone who is deceiving or has been deceived.
Wow, you mean I can understand Chinese?
If you don't see the new things that computers can do with ai, then you are being purposely ignorant. There's tons of slop, along with useful capabilities; but even that slop generation is clearly a new ability computers didn't have before.
And yes, if you can process written Chinese fully and respond to it, you do understand it.
Understanding is when you follow instructions without any comprehension, got it 👍
You have to understand instructions on some level to be able to follow them. 👍🏻
what's your point? do you believe that llms actually understand their own output?
That's a difficult question. The semantics of 'understand' and the metaphysics of how that might apply is rather unclear to me. LLMs have a certain consistent modeling which agrees with their output, so that's the same as human's thought which I think we'd agree is 'understanding'; but feeding 1+1 into a calculator will also consistently get the same result. Is that understanding? In some respects it is, the math is fully represented by the inner workings of the calculator. It doesn't feel to us like real understanding because it's trivial and very causal. I think that's just because the problem is so simple. So what we end up with is that assuming an ai is reasonably correct, whether it is really understanding is more a basis of the complexity it handles. And the complexity of human thought is much higher than current ai systems partly because we always hold all sorts of other thoughts and memories that can be independent of a particular task, but are combined at some level.
So, in a way the llm construct understands its limited mapping of a problem. But even though it's using the same input /output language as humans do, current llms don't understand things at anywhere near the level that humans do.
It’s not a difficult question.
LLMs do not understand things.
If you're going to define it that way, then obviously that's how it is. But do you really understand what understanding is?
Citation needed.
You can tell a person to think about apples, and the person will think about apples.
You can tell an LLM 'think about apples' and the LLM will say 'Okay' but it won't think about apples; it is only saying 'okay' because its training data suggests that is the most common response to someone asking someone else to think about apples. LLMs do not have an internal experience. They are statistical models.
Well, the LLM does briefly 'think' about apples in that it activates its 'thought' areas relating to apples (the token repressing apples in its system). Right now, an llm's internal experience is based on its previous training and the current prompt while it's running. Our brains are always on and circulating thoughts, so of course that's a very different concept of experience. But you can bet there are people working on building an ai system (with llm components) that works that way too. The line will get increasingly blurred. Or brain processing is just an organic based statistical model with complex state management and chemical based timing control.
You misunderstand. The outcome of asking an LLM to think about an apple is the token 'Okay'. It probably doesn't get very far into even what you claim is 'thought' about apples, because when someone says the phrase "Think about X", the immediate response is almost always 'Okay' and never anything about whatever 'X' is. That is the sum total of its objective. It does not perform a facsimile of human thought; it performs an analysis of what the most likely next token would be, given what text existed before it. It imitates human output without any of the behavior or thought processes that lead up to that output in humans. There is no model of how the world works. There is no theory of mind. There is only how words are related to each other with no 'understanding'. It's very good at outputting reasonable text, and even drawing inferences based on word relations, but anthropomorphizing LLMs is a path that leads to exactly the sort of conclusion that the original comic is mocking.
Asking an LLM if it is alive does not cause the LLM to ponder the possibility of whether or not it is alive. It causes the LLM to output the response most similar to its training data, and nothing more. It is incapable of pondering its own existence, because that isn't how it works.
Yes, our brains are actually an immensely complex neural network, but beyond that the structure is so ridiculously different that it's closer to comparing apples to the concept of justice than comparing apples to oranges.
Oh my goddd...
Honestly, I think we need to take all these solipsistic tech-weirdos and trap them in a Starbucks until they can learn how to order a coffee from the counter without hyperventilating.