The perfect metaphor for LLM/Not AI:

Many birds can talk. They imitate the speech they have heard in the home where they live (not unlike the LLMs “listening” to the data they steal/scrape). Talking birds operate on exactly the same principal as large language models. No one would say talking birds are intelligent; why would anyone say that about an LLM?

When a talking bird says, “How are you buddy,” it has no idea who it is talking to or what it is saying. It’s just repeating words it has heard. It is not insulting you when it says “Up yours lady,” nor does it know it is talking about itself when it says, “Pretty Bird” or “Polly Want A Cracker.” It is not self-conscious. It understands nothing about what it is saying. Sometimes it randomly says something appropriate, just like an LLM.

With regard to consciousness and vocabulary, Wikipedia says “There is debate… whether…talking parrots also have some cognitive understanding… [S]ome budgerigars have been observed to have a vocabulary of almost 2,000 words.” Which just goes to show a large vocabulary does not necessarily indicate cognition.

Speaking only for myself, I don’t want a talking bird doing my programming, my customer service, my hiring, my strategic planning or my writing. If you do, be my guest. They are entertaining, but not as entertaining as Taylor Swift or Billy Joel.

Another good analogy: LLMs are just Imessage predictive text written large and expensive. Predicting the next word is what they do best and most reliably. Any task that requires more than that is probably inappropriate for an LLM.