Dear Grimes, Appreciate your candor, and I understand that your subjective impression is to believe that there is something there. But a. Th…

Dear Grimes, Appreciate your candor, and I understand that your subjective impression is to believe that there is something there. But a. That’s the very Eliza illusion I am pointing out. It is possible to fool people into seeing things that aren’t real (e.g., pareidolia, and seeing Mother Theresa in a cinnamon bun). Eerything I understand about LLMs tells me that is the case in this instance; you aren’t really engaging in that part of my argument. Basically you are looking at the output of the model but not examining the mechanism by which it gets there; as a cognitive psychologist, i believe that understanding the mechanism is essential, and that it points to something like mimicry in a system that can readily talk about things with no real world referent (e.g. kids it doesn’t have). b. Subjective impressions are the essence of consciousness; nothing I see in how LLMs operate conveys to me that LLMs actually have those. But, two points of agreement, too a. I do think that (depending on your definitions) it is theoretically possible that maybe some kind of AI might have a subjective experience. and b. I agree that we would want to think very carefully about how we treat such systems if they did come to exist. So it’s not wrong to raise these questions now. Cheers, Gary

Source: Gary Marcus (X) | 2026-05-29