alt Hacker NewsYes, but just because language fails to make a distinction doesn't mean there isn't one.
> The only important part are observed outcomes and capabilities.
That's wishful thinking. Not even an engineer would say that. The stability of a state is just as important as achieving it. This is trivially and more intuitively demonstrated with other more down-to-earth identity statements such as "I'm a billionaire" and "the building is standing".
I think we can confidently say LLMs probabilistically achieve a perceived state that is remarkably similar to intelligence, but crumbles upon inspection and seeing it "in motion" so to speak. The same happens to AI-generated images.
I'm not sure why this sparks so much debate every time. If we're looking for a fountain of "realism", you're not going to beat reality and nature itself. All else will eventually have tells that they are not real.
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It may be of interest to philosophers, but it has little impact on economic job replacement and how people will earn their living and all the downstream upheaval from that. At some point maybe philosophers will find AI-generated philosophical musings about the nature of AI to be better than what comes from their peers (if blinded).
It also has little impact on the dangerous use cases.
A property is either consequential or it isn't. If it is then it must be at the very least [1] observable. If it is not, then you just have an imaginary distinction. The instability of an unstable system is something that can be observed if important. Stability is part of "behaviours and outcomes".
It's baffling that people cannot see the obvious contradiction in simultaneously asserting a system is missing a crucial property whose effects cannot be observed.
[1] It can be invisible. The important part is that its effects are observed.