Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are anthropomorphing. The machine doesn’t “really” understand, it’s just “simulating” it understands. “You” is “3 characters on an input string that are used to configure a program”. The prompt could have been any other thing, including a binary blob. It’s just more convenient for humans to use natural language to communicate, and the machine already has natural language features, so they used that instead of cre…
How do you know you aren't just "simulating" understanding?
I say that the machine is "simulating it understands" because it does an obviously bad job at it.
We only need to look at obvious cases of prompt attacks, or cases where AI gets off rails and produces garbage, or worse - answers that look plausible but are incorrect. The system is blatantly unsophisticated, when compared to regular human-level understanding.
Those errors make it clear that we are dealing with "smoke and mirrors" - a relatively simple (compared to our mental process) matching algorithm.
Once (if) it starts behaving like a human, admittedly, it will be much harder for me to not anthropomorphize it myself.