To skip the end last question, which is the most interesting, I’ll answer by not answering haha.
> What if the AI was more interesting and intellectually stimulating than a human?
What if? It’s not anywhere close to that. GPT is so far from “human level” even if it sounds good. It’s statistic regurgitation, it’s not thought. If it was more intellectual, then I think there’d be a lot more change in the world than HN.
> Please tell me: for you, what is the difference between hearing what people think, and hearing what a human-level AI thinks?
Humans can have original thoughts. AIs that are trained on a human text corpus are by definition finding statistical correlations between preexisting things.
You can say things like “I know it’s unpopular but I like OOP because objects make it easy to assign team boundaries at work”. And the replies can be about real work experiences of real people who understand those trade offs.
An AI can discuss this, sorta, but it’s not real. The AI knows nothing of these trade offs other than inevitably mentioning Java.
> And even in the remaining 1% of cases, aren't they necessarily just functional products of the things they've seen/read/experienced (i.e. the inputs they've received, even if gathered by feedback when interacting with the world)?
This is what I was thinking a lot about. I think the answer is no.
Humans are introspective and reflective. You are based on your experiences, yes, but you don’t just regurgitate statistically likely language. Crucially, before you answer a question you can reflect on the logic of that answer.
> Are you saying a human-level AI, by definition, cannot ever be interesting to you, just because it's an AI, even though it could be like a human in every other way?
Not to be weird, but I wouldn’t discriminate against a human level intelligence because it’s a machine, but a language model like GPT is absolutely not a human level intelligence.