If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II

> we begin by implementing and training a neural network in Age of Empires II (AoE II) Although it might seem like a fun exercise, wholly unrelated to the topic of anthropomorphism in LLM research, we note that this immediately implies that (1) any sufficiently powerful substrate could implement an entity equivalent to an LLM

Why does it imply that? That doesn't sound right to me. Unless we define "sufficiently powerful" as by definition producing that outcome, which seems unhelpful.

e.g. there have been experiments training transformers on things other than language, and it's not clear that this produces LLM-like qualities (nor does it seem likely to me).

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Edit: I have misunderstood. The point was that LLMs can be run on any hardware (or in this case, emulator) that can do the actual computations. So the author picked AoE because it's an obviously silly example that goes against the tendency to anthropomorphize.

So basically it's the "substance/structure" question. (GPT-5 running on human neurons. Conscious or nah? Human neurons simulated on NVidia. Conscious or nah?)

But by the same argument, if you simulate a human brain in AoE, then what?

( Or for that matter, the universe containing all human brains: https://xkcd.com/505/ )

If we find out the universe is being run on a computer made out of legos, does that suddenly make all of us not sentient for some reason?

good article I do think that its natural for humans to anthromorphize especially something that can do a convincing job butt the leap to AOE2 is a bit stretching things. If you hear your dog say 'wololo' is he AOE2 ?

Doom - anything turing complete can run doom :P

I'm not sure who this kind of thing is aimed at. I think the majority of people who are happy to anthropomorphise LLMs from a philosophical point of view (rather than those who just do it for convenience, the same way you might a cat or dog or stupid thermostat that never works right), are already completely happy with the notion that a computer game might have elements that are human like. They've already accepted that key aspects of being a human are substrate independent, so why would the idea of a computer game as substrate be disconcerting to them? There's no bullet left to bite here.