Alison Gopnik [bolds are mine]:
A very common trope is to treat LLMs as if they were intelligent agents going out in the world and doing things. That’s just a category mistake.
A much better way of thinking about them is as a technology that allows humans to access information from many other humans and use that information to make decisions. We have been doing this for as long as we’ve been human.
Language itself you could think of as a means that allows this. So are writing and the internet. These are all ways that we get information from other people.
Similarly, LLMs give us a very effective way of accessing information from other humans. Rather than go out, explore the world, and draw conclusions, as humans do, LLMs statistically summarize the information humans put onto the web.
It’s important to note that these cultural technologies have shaped and changed the way our society works. This isn’t a debunking along the lines of “AI doesn’t really matter.” In many ways, having a new cultural technology like print has had a much greater impact than having a new agent, like a new person, in the world.
Source: “How to Raise Your Artificial Intelligence: A Conversation with Alison Gopnik and Melanie Mitchell | Los Angeles Review of Books.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 31 May 2024, lareviewofbooks.org/article/how-to-raise-your-artificial-intelligence-a-conversation-with-alison-gopnik-and-melanie-mitchell/. Accessed 19 June 2024.