The criticism in the paper is of the architecture of LLMs, isn't it? The paper contends
"""Text generated by an LM is not grounded in communicative intent, any model of the world, or any model of the reader’s state of mind. [...] an LM is a system for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning: a stochastic parrot"""
They're saying that the model cannot learn anything about reality irrespective of training data. Your point is an interesting one, but I think it's distinct. To your point though, this is unfalsifiable from the perspective of the "bird". I can't prove that I'm not a dysfunctional cyborg with false perceptions, which makes me wonder if that's a meaningful distinction.
>Animal sensory organs do not produce false information,
I happen to be in possession of some of these and I think this needs a "usually, under ordinary conditions". (Nitpicky and not critical to my point, but I liked the beginning of this sentence too much to edit it out)
>nor do they provide the brain an interpretation of what they perceive
Whereas this I'd argue is not true at all. My cones interact with wave-particle photons at particular wavelengths. I can't even conceptualize wave-particle duality (though some humans can), but "red" and "blue" are the bread and butter of my visual consciousness. These correspond to firings of my sensory neurons much more than they correspond to anything in reality. If that's not interpretation, what is it/what is interpretation?
>The word "real" is itself meaningless to it; they're both real in that they appear in its training corpus.
I expect we agree that I can show a multimodal model a real and a CGI picture and it can tell me which is which. I can take a CGI dragon to GPT 5 and say "look what I found in my backyard" and it will say "Yeah right". Are you saying this is something only possible thanks to RLHF or other modern techniques? That may be the case, unsure how to test that without access to pretraining-only models. Or would you say my experiment is faulty here and doesn't get to your underlying claim?
On the flipside, I could show some meh drawings of fairies to Arthur Conan Doyle, and he'd say "Whoa, this changes everything". I consider him to be one of the great rational minds of history, but he was unable to pass your test here. (In fairness, he was in his 60s and his senses may have dulled, though his belief in spiritualism at large dates to his prime).
Appreciate the conversation!