> Just wanted to question why these elements (namely intelligence and reasoning) strike the nerve that they do.
“Just asking questions” is a meme of the unscrupulous.
I think you are unfairly lumping those who believe in human exceptionalism with those cynical of the economics of such claims.
It’s okay, to me, for people to be ignorant of what llms are. What a dismally bland existence if everyone were just llm experts.
What strikes a nerve with me is the people financially incentivized to do so are leveraging the terror, both the awe and fear interpretations, of those ignorant of the tech.
> The anthropomorphism argument is case in point, really. It poses the accusation that the other side is imparting human qualities to a machine, without needing to touch on what makes those qualities human or why that matters in the first place.
This reads as circular reasoning. Those claiming the opposite are also failing to define what those qualities are.
Anthropomorphism is a real thing. I can flinch in pain for the sake of my couch when a friend jumps onto it, but that hardly provides, without me needing to define human pain explicitly, an opportunity for said friend to respond with the absurd claim that human pain is in fact couch based.