It is impossible to accurately imitate the action of intelligent beings without being intelligent. To believe otherwise is to believe that intelligence is a vacuous property.
An unintelligent device can accurately imitate the action of intelligent beings within a given scope, in the same way an actor can accurately imitate the action of a fictional character in a given scope (the stage or camera) without actually being that character.
If the idea is that something cannot accurately replicate the entirety of intelligence without being intelligent itself, then perhaps. But that isn't really what people talk about with LLMs given their obvious limitations.
I suppose they really only have to be good at knowing what sort of thing the audience would believe a great thinker would say. As long as the audience does not consist of great thinkers they also cannot know for sure what a great thinker would say.
That's true for unverifiable "talk professions" where there is no grounding and it's all self-referential navel-gazing chatter.
But LLMs are already beyond that in writing code that passes actual tests, proving theorems that are check able with formal methods etc.
The people who still say LLMs are just parrots in 2026 will just keep saying this no matter what, so I don't think it makes sense to argue this point further.
That was probably phrased poorly. If a robot can independently accurately do what an intelligent person would do when placed in a novel situation, then yes, I would say it is intelligent.
If it's just basically being a puppet, then no. You tell me what claude code is more like, a puppet, or a person?
Your comment is a perfect example of a human hallucinating something and not knowing they are wrong about it. People are confidently wrong about things _all the time_.
No no, you don't understand. People can misunderstand. But they will not, for example, proceed to drive a car as if they have attended driving lessons when they have not.
They might misremember, but they can know, for sure, if they have NOT come across some information. So if you ask someone if they know where `x` is, they might have came across that info, and still be wrong. But they will know if they have never come across it.
A neural network will happily produce an output when when the input is completely out of range of the training data.
> if you ask someone if they know where `x` is, they might have came across that info, and still be wrong. But they will know if they have never come across it.
False memories are super common. "I thought I had seen this thing there, but turns out it's not" is a perfectly normal, very frequent occurrence.
If someone ask "Hey how do I do this thing in python programming language" what are the chances that you will try to make up a solution, if you have never tried to learn Python?
Q: How do I reverse an array in the Navajo programming language?
A: I'm not familiar with a programming language called "Navajo." It's possible you might be thinking of a different language, or it could be something very niche that I don't have information about.
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As for your question, the chances go from 0 to 100% depending on how many languages I already know and whether I have an idea (or I think I have an idea) of how python looks like. And LLMs have seen (and tried to "learn") pretty much everything.
