The Telepathy Tapes (hosted by Ky Dickens) makes the false claim that, among others claims, nonverbal autistic children have telepathic abilities and that is revealed through a method called “spelling to communicate.” “Spelling to communicate” is a rebrand of the now discredited therapy method known as Facilitated Communication.
Eh… I don’t think that is quite an accurate/fair analogy.
Simply because it is dehumanizing, on the one hand, … neurotypicals are people, they have agency, and emotions, LLMs do not…
…and also LLMs explcitly do just try to mirror or tailor their vocab / writing style to be ‘correct’ as per what you are saying.
They’re literally built/designed to do this, as essentially extremely fancy autocomplete machines.
To me, that’s actually much more like autistic masking.
The hallucinations are thus arguably more akin to the kind of panic that occurs in an autistic person when they are trying to, on the fly, merge two different social masks… they say strange or awkward things or sometimes just fail completely and essentially make up some bullshit / contradictory / nonsensical or false concept.
They also don’t really actually have any real concept of ethics, as operating guidelines. They can discuss ethical theories, but they cannot really… employ them, in practice, unless you did a ton of work to try to command them to, basically.
Also, they’re fundamentally incapable of real learning. They can perhaps mimic this, in a single conversation, but all that’s gone with a new instance of talking to them.
Neurotypicals are obviously capable of learning.