I'm sure that there are people that are deluded into thinking ChatGPT loves them like a real life flesh and blood being can even when it says it can't, but we have such limited vocabulary,
especially as laymen, for describing any non-human intelligence, that saying it's thinking and reasoning aren't entirely unreasonable words to describe what it's doing. sure, it's not thinking in the same way a human would, but when a computer, pre-LLM, and even pre-Internet, is doing something that requires the user to wait, saying the computer is "thinking" is an entirely accepted practice.
So if we want to get people to stop using the words thinking and reasoning, we have to get replacement words into the lexicon. if I tell an LLM A implies B implies C, and I tell it A is true and it's able to tell me that C is thus also true, sure it's entirely due to that much logic existing in its training corpus, but unless we get to a point where I can say that ChatGPT is dot-producting an essay for me, or some other phrase, saying it's not doing "thinking" is going to fall flat on its face. Hell, Deepseek R1's output for the local model literally says <think>. It may not be thinking in a biological being sense, and it may not be reason in a biological sense to conclude C if A implies B implies C, if A is true, but we lack the common colloquial language to describe it otherwise.
completely agree. people say a classic chess engine is "thinking" when it goes deeper into the search tree, but nobody is confused about that. This colloquial language doesn't bother me so much.
But there really are people who think they are talking to something more than that. Like within a conversation with today's consumer product, they sincerely believe that an actual being is instantiated who has goals and intentions and talks to them.
Using language like "thinking" doesn't bother me. I'm not a stickler for precision language in colloquial speech.
I do think it's important to deflate the hype and give context to what you mean by "thinking" in products, technologies and so on. Calling it a "stochastic parrot" is a bit pithy but not unreasonable. Plus it's memorable.
So if we want to get people to stop using the words thinking and reasoning, we have to get replacement words into the lexicon. if I tell an LLM A implies B implies C, and I tell it A is true and it's able to tell me that C is thus also true, sure it's entirely due to that much logic existing in its training corpus, but unless we get to a point where I can say that ChatGPT is dot-producting an essay for me, or some other phrase, saying it's not doing "thinking" is going to fall flat on its face. Hell, Deepseek R1's output for the local model literally says <think>. It may not be thinking in a biological being sense, and it may not be reason in a biological sense to conclude C if A implies B implies C, if A is true, but we lack the common colloquial language to describe it otherwise.