Despite what tech CEOs might say, large language models are not smart in any recognizably human sense of the word.

To call AI a con isn’t to say that the technology is not remarkable, that it has no use, or that it will not transform the world (perhaps for the better) in the right hands. It is to say that AI is not what its developers are selling it as: a new class of thinking—and, soon, feeling—machines. Altman brags about ChatGPT-4.5’s improved “emotional intelligence,” which he says makes users feel like they’re “talking to a thoughtful person.” Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic, argued last year that the next generation of artificial intelligence will be “smarter than a Nobel Prize winner.” Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google’s DeepMind, said the goal is to create “models that are able to understand the world around us.”


These statements betray a conceptual error: Large language models do not, cannot, and will not “understand” anything at all. They are not emotionally intelligent or smart in any meaningful or recognizably human sense of the word. LLMs are impressive probability gadgets that have been fed nearly the entire internet, and produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another.

Many people, however, fail to grasp how large language models work, what their limits are, and, crucially, that LLMs do not think and feel but instead mimic and mirror. They are AI illiterate—understandably, because of the misleading ways its loudest champions describe the technology, and troublingly, because that illiteracy makes them vulnerable to one of the most concerning near-term AI threats: the possibility that they will enter into corrosive relationships (intellectual, spiritual, romantic) with machines that only seem like they have ideas or emotions.