<div dir="ltr"> Interacting with real people as if they were stochastic parrots is a time honored conversational tradition.<div><div><br></div><div>-- rec --</div></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Aug 26, 2025 at 10:58\u202fAM Prof David West <<a href="mailto:profwest@fastmail.fm">profwest@fastmail.fm</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">My take was different, and probably a result of previous bias/opinions/readings.<br>
<br>
Whether or not LLMs have an "interior" is mostly irrelevant. The problem is that they have very limited, Turkle implies but one, channel for communication\u2014language.<br>
<br>
Asserting that humans are limited to that channel does "devalue the richness and complexity of the human," or at least the myriad and complex means humans use to communicate.<br>
<br>
Eric Charles\u2014in a different venue\u2014 noted that: "opponents claim AI knows next to nothing, proponents claim AI has Ph.D. level intelligence. Both are right."<br>
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davew<br>
<br>
<br>
On Tue, Aug 26, 2025, at 11:02 AM, glen wrote:<br>
> Sherry Turkle on AI, empathy, and the fight for human connection<br>
> <a href="https://www.afterbabel.com/p/reclaiming-conversation-age-of-ai" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.afterbabel.com/p/reclaiming-conversation-age-of-ai</a><br>
><br>
> My guess is some of you know Turkle personally. Anyway, I thought this <br>
> was a good document. I *think* I reject her assertion that:<br>
><br>
> "[transactional conversation|pretend empathy|info-only conversation] is <br>
> a new form of behaviorism that devalues the richness and complexity of <br>
> the human."<br>
><br>
> That assertion seems to imply no interior to the LLMs (where humans <br>
> have an interior). As I've argued here before, I am a behaviorist, just <br>
> maybe not a simplistic one. Everything that goes on inside is encoded <br>
> on our surface to some lossy extent. Similarly, the LLMs have an <br>
> interior. Their sensitivity to prompts seems to push them slightly out <br>
> of the category of pure simulus-response machines. And that's true for <br>
> the ones I run locally on my own machine. Add in all the bells and <br>
> whistles of the cloud LLMs who can search the web, write and run <br>
> simulations, etc. and it seems too naive to claim the interactions are <br>
> "flat" or "thin".<br>
><br>
> Regardless, I'm on board with her primary gist. The bots are not <br>
> *alive*. I don't go to the pub to learn about time crystals. It's some <br>
> kind of category error to think inter-human conversation is solely, or <br>
> at all, about information transfer.<br>
><br>
> -- <br>
> ¡s\u0131\u0279\u018e \u05df\u0131\u0250H \u22a5 \u0250\u05df\u05df\u01dddo\u0279 \u01dd u\u01dd\u05df\u0183<br>
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