Despite mentioning a philosopher (good pick!), this is just creative writing rehashing one side of the hard problem -- or, more specifically, restating the dogma that Turing wrote his most famous paper to debunk. It's really good creative writing, at least!

There's really not much else to say, cause it's all just begging the question by assuming that dogma. Like, here:

> The fact that AI can use statistical prediction to answer questions or carry on conversations tells us something important about how regular our real world is.

Sure, it's interesting if you assume that it's "just" statistical prediction. There's a link, but it's just more creative restatements of the dogma, e.g. "But the LLM is just guessing words"

> Indeed, the chatbot is less real than the character, because the character is the product of another mind, while the chatbot's words are the product of complex mathematical operations conducted over a massive database of all the words humans have uttered, arranged by their frequency in relation to one another.

How is a fictional character the product of someone's mind, but a character generated from a massive database of words from other people's minds is not?

> Of course, the more you know about a subject, the less convincing the AI's responses are.

This is said all the time by AI skeptics and I think it's right in some areas and massively wrong in others.

I know (or at least assume I know) a lot about certain coding domains where frontier models also show convincing ability. And we know that frontier LLMs really do excel in some areas of mathematics (i.e. when an inexpert human was able to prompt the models to derive a closer bound on the Riemann Hypothesis).

OTOH I know those same models struggle to do things I'm not an expert in (e.g. writing English in a captivating way) because I read their output and have taste.