Position Paper: Against Spurious Sparks $-$ Dovelating Inflated AI Claims

Humans have a tendency to see 'human'-like qualities in objects around them. We name our cars, and talk to pets and even household appliances, as if they could understand us as other humans do. This behavior, called anthropomorphism, is also seeing traction in Machine Learning (ML), where human-like intelligence is claimed to be perceived in Large Language Models (LLMs). In this position paper, considering professional incentives, human biases, and general methodological setups, we discuss how the current search for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is a perfect storm for over-attributing human-like qualities to LLMs. In several experiments, we demonstrate that the discovery of human-interpretable patterns in latent spaces should not be a surprising outcome. Also in consideration of common AI portrayal in the media, we call for the academic community to exercise extra caution, and to be extra aware of principles of academic integrity, in interpreting and communicating about AI research outcomes.
Comment: 20 pages, 15 figures. Preliminary work. Under review by the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)