The very name – Large Language Model (LLM), the technology that powers AI, reveals something interesting about what AI is and isn’t.
After testing a number of different AI products with prompts about the nature of reality, consciousness and mind, what I am mostly struck by is their excruciatingly exquisite articulacy. Their crystal clear clarity in expressing concepts with language is somehow too good, certainly inhumanly flawless. There may or may not be flaws and faults in the relative facts or opinions expressed yet what is undeniable is the immaculate rendering of language itself. Hardly surprising since language machines is essentially what they are.
Interesting to consider that despite manipulating language so effectively and efficiently AI cannot experience what it is communicating. There is no understanding. While our expression emerges from our experience, AI’s output is regurgitation, albeit a massively sophisticated repurposing of existing language, not an expression of the raw actuality of being.