Perhaps I'm arrogant, shortsighted and asinine. On the other hand, maybe it isn't so crazy to think that patterns of language do in some way represent thought and feeding lots of written language into a language model that is designed to mimic the process of expressing ideas in the way that the brain synthesizes new ways of expressing things based on it's experience, isn't a process completely different than what humans are doing when they study and then write.
That isn't to say that the computer knows what it is doing and it isn't to say that the computer isn't going to produce a lot of nonsense. But even random markov chain babbling will sometimes produce interesting sentences that make you stop and think. The meaning is in the mind of the reader.
If we think of LLMs as a large mixing pot that combines ideas from vast numbers of written sources in what is often mundane, but may occasionally spark a thought or an imaginative creative leap that humans haven't yet made, they become just another tool that humans can use to think and sometimes see things differently.
That isn't to say that the computer knows what it is doing and it isn't to say that the computer isn't going to produce a lot of nonsense. But even random markov chain babbling will sometimes produce interesting sentences that make you stop and think. The meaning is in the mind of the reader.
If we think of LLMs as a large mixing pot that combines ideas from vast numbers of written sources in what is often mundane, but may occasionally spark a thought or an imaginative creative leap that humans haven't yet made, they become just another tool that humans can use to think and sometimes see things differently.