Again, we are stuck in a semantics debate. What I call reasoning you don’t, it seems.

It is a pattern matcher. It does not reason.

But all I know, as someone that has worked in software engineering for 25+ years, is that the output of whatever it does, and whatever you call it, is incredibly useful.

I have a degree in computer science. Irrelevant. Anyone can see that the “AI” is not intelligence.

Saying “it just generates text” is a reflexive reaction that attempts to flatten the nuance.

It’s a large language model. It generates text.

All Columbus did was sail west.

And killed indigenous people. Datacenters and shitty chatbots are killing people today, good point.

All America did was throw some fuel into a tube and put Neil Armstrong on the top.

Scientists did that, not America.

All Picasso did was to throw some paint onto a cloth.

At least he did it himself instead of prompting an image generator.

All this PhD student did was generate text.

Correct. And you seem to have learned nothing useful.

Surely we’ve got to have some more nuance in there.

LLMs can sometimes be useful. AI does not yet exist. It’s a scam.

If there’s a difference between 10000 monkeys hacking on a typewriter and a human writing their doctoral thesis, the quality of their act isn’t in whether text was generated but WHAT text was generated.

You don’t understand the metaphor. It’s about the nature of infinity, not the competency of monkeys as authors.

If you run an AI prompt infinite times, it will inevitably generate a correct answer somewhere in there. The rest of the time, it will be wrong, potentially with lethal consequences.