The Trouble With Treating AIs as Humans
They're just computers after all!
We’ve anthropomorphised these models to a ridiculous degree.
We’ve accepted the absurd idea that they’re thinking rather than computing. That they’re performing "advanced reasoning" instead of just running calculations for a bit longer on more powerful hardware. We talk about them as if they’re human.
And now, a judge has ruled that it’s fine for an LLM to ingest and "recall from memory" a book because, well, isn’t that what humans do?
The case in question involves Anthropic, which purchased and scanned millions of print books to train its model, Claude. The judge deemed this "fair use," arguing:
"Everyone reads texts, too, then writes new texts. They may need to pay for getting their hands on a text in the first instance. But to make anyone pay specifically for the use of a book each time they read it, each time they recall it from memory, each time they later draw upon it when writing new things in new ways would be unthinkable. For centuries, we have read and re-read books. We have admired, memorised, and internalised their sweeping themes, their substantive points, and their stylistic solutions to recurring writing problems." 1
This reasoning is flawed because it equates human learning with machine processing. An LLM isn’t "reading" or "recalling from memory"—it’s running an algorithm on stored data.
Would the judge have ruled the same way if, say, Google Search had scanned every book and reproduced its content in search results? Of course not. There would be outrage, and no court would extend the same leniency.
But because we chat with these models—because they call us by name, "remember" our conversations, and their creators insist they’re thinking—we treat them differently. We’ve blurred the line between computation and cognition.
It’s time to regain some sanity in this conversation. These aren’t minds. They’re algorithms running on computers. We already have the words for that—let’s use them.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gtozer_ai-llms-activity-7343618868717793282-tzuM?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAdxQ7EB1Q27_NnwyjJjoiXNXPLCyzuao1g