I looked up how this works, and I found ads for law firms that specialize in removing bad reviews. They charge a set price for each review they remove. As a regular consumer, you just have to accept that your honest reviews will be removed, unless you're willing to risk going to court, where you'll have to prove that your subjective experience was accurate.

Calling LLMs "chatbots" at this point just sounds like an attempt to dismiss them. These "chatbots" are now capable of answering any question you can think of more intelligently than 99% of humans. If you don't consider that intelligence, then your definition of intelligence makes no sense.

You say this based on what? Your brain is executing instructions on wetware. The entire universe is governed by physical laws.

At its base, the argument that computers can't be conscious is dualist. It assumes that there's some parallel realm of spirit that the brain is peculiarly able to tap into, but which computer programs that function in very similar ways to the brain don't tap into.

> the quality of the simulacrum that LLMs produce vs. pre-ML chatbots.

It seems to me that you're denigrating LLMs, or implying that they're only simulating thought, as opposed to actually thinking. But the difference between thinking and an extremely good simulacrum of thought is meaningless. They become the same thing. It's a bit like the Mitchell and Webb skit about faking the moon landings, in which the plotters quickly realize that the only way to convincingly fake landing on the moon is to fly a rocket to the moon and film the "fake" landings on the moon.

LLMs know more than any human being, are simultaneously experts in nearly every field of science and humanities, are able to make novel mathematical discoveries, can write and understand every major written language, and can give you an intelligent answer to almost any question you pose to them.

How is that not human-level intelligence? If a human could do all of that, we would consider them a genius.

On the one hand, it's like having a free private tutor who is always available. It's a great learning tool.

On the other hand, students can use it to do all their homework for them, and skip learning altogether.

So is your brain. That's the problem with this argument.

When you read about the theological questions that led Christians to kill and excommunicate one another, "angels dancing on the head of a pin" is not far off. The Homoousion, Monophysitism, the Filioque controversy... It's all so arcane and poorly defined. It almost makes one wish Positivism had been invented 2000 years earlier.

The current AI debate about consciousness does remind me of that in one respect: no one can even clearly define what consciousness is.

If you want to improve that system, relying on people like RFK Jr. (a crackpot who rejects basically all of modern medical science, right down to the germ theory of disease) and Trump (the most corrupt president in US history) is crazy.

The basic research that leads to these treatments is all selected and evaluated using peer review. Even the results of the clinical trials are analyzed using peer review.

You're happy to send us back to the Middle Ages, when people actually did think leeches were the solution to everything, because you've got some weird chip on your shoulder.

Peer review isn't perfect, but it has gotten us incredibly far, and it's way better than political appointees who don't believe that AIDS is caused by HIV making decisions based on culture war considerations.

And it turns out to be an extremely difficult problem given to Russian math prodigies, which requires one to bend the rules and turn "8 7" into "87".

That's a prime example of anti-AI bigotry right there.

I'm only half joking.

I don't even know what it means to generate "plausible text." It reasons based on the input and context, and then generates a response that you could normally only get from a highly intelligent, extremely knowledgeable person. You can call that "plausible text" all you want, but at that point, you might as well call human intelligence "a bunch of neurons firing." It's missing the forest for the trees.

Heck, I haven't even downloaded the ChatGPT app, but I use their website all the time.

AI use has taken off, and a large fraction of the population is using it regularly, if their own accord.

People have all sorts of concerns about how AI will change society, but that's precisely because it's so useful for so many things. If it were useless or just a fad, there would be no reason to worry.

What I see is people using AI of their own free will, because it's incredibly useful.

It's true that inside tech companies, AI is being pushed into products, but outside of those companies, normal people are rapidly adopting AI for all sorts of daily uses.

"I don't know what this symbol on my dishwasher means." -> Ask AI.

"Why is my bread not rising properly?" -> Ask AI.

These are the types of things that previously would have taken a lot longer to figure out, but that you can get an immediate answer to with AI. That's the fundamental reason why it's taking off. Not because it's being pushed.

"What sayest thou?" -> "Was sagst du?"

In fact, for the above, you don't even have to know a single German word. You just have to know what for question words, "wh" -> "w", that the English "y" at the end of a syllable usually comes from an older Germanic "g" sound, and that "th" was replaced by "d" in German. That gets you 90% of the way from early modern English to modern German in the above example.