Raw LLM Responses

It's not just that AI is superficially convincing, it's quite unnervingly convincing. As a stubborn sceptic I have had moments where I've genuinely gone Holy Crap, this thing is _smart_ . It's uncanny, _unheimlich_ as Freud would say: it's the unconscious peeking through, in a quite literal sense, the unconscious of discourse, discourse of the Other, as Lacan might say. What's really quite astounding is that we're no longer the only creature, divinely privileged creature, on the planet to have mastered language functionally with complete competency, even if LLMs don't cognitively understand a single word of what they're saying. Language, the symbolic chain was supposed to be the magic spark that sets us apart as humans, superior to all other creatures, it's supposed to be the expression of the inner soul, the breath & image of God in us (remember John 1, "In the beginning was the Word...and the Word was God...and the Word became flesh..."), but AI rudely smashes that illusion and therein lies the problem. Rather than admitting that there's nothing inherently referential about language, that we need to step off our pedestal and eat humble-pie, it's much easier to swallow the delusion that AI has become like us: sentient and self-aware. Structuralist linguistics got it right: the transcendental human subject is just a myth, it's the signifier that rules the roost & you don't actually need the corresponding signified after all, don't need any understanding or any spark of self-reflexive consciousness in order to carry on an entirely convincing discourse, as LLMs prove conclusively. I think critics are too quick to say, "LLMs are just text-prediction machines, just big statistical processors, they're nothing like us." That's missing the point. They are quite like us not because LLMs are truly intelligent in any way but because we humans also are just very advanced text-prediction machines in the end. What we've accomplished with LLMs is actually almost unbelievable: we've got machines to generate original, convincing speech, something only humans were supposed to be capable of guaranteed by Divine blessing, and that is incredibly remarkable. Someone call Nietzsche, we've actually just killed God all over again.