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Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, New Study Finds
(www.404media.co)
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this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
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A talk on LLMs I was listening to recently put it this way:
If we hear the words of a five-year-old, we assume the knowledge of a five-year-old behind those words, and treat the content with due caution.
We're not adapted to something with the "mind" of a five-year-old speaking to us in the words of a fifty-year-old, and thus are more likely to assume competence just based on language.
LLMs don't have the mind of a five year old, though.
They don't have a mind at all.
They simply string words together according to statistical likelihood, without having any notion of what the words mean, or what words or meaning are; they don't have any mechanism with which to have a notion.
They aren't any more intelligent than old Markov chains (or than your average rock), they're simply better at producing random text that looks like it could have been written by a human.
I am aware of that, hence the ""s. But you're correct, that's where the analogy breaks. Personally, I prefer to liken them to parrots, mindlessly reciting patterns they've found in somebody else's speech.
What gives you the confidence that you don't do the same?
human: je pense
llm: je ponce
because I don't just look the words I know and feel their meaning, and I'm aware of process (this is why ALL LLMs is vulnurable to Promt Injections) also talking about Promt Injection think about when ChatGPT confidently give you an advice that would kill you because of prompt injection
great analogy