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Yes and no.

They extract information in much the same way that an educated but naive reader can extract information from a book. (Thousands of times quicker of course).

But there's a lot more than that going on, both when a book is written, and when it's read by a reader with life experience. A book is an encoding and transmission medium for knowledge - and a very good one - but it isn't the knowledge itself.

Like a musical score for an orchestral symphony isn't the symphony itself. (Granted, reading a score and synthesizing an orchestra is well within the grasp of the models we have now).

Poetry is perhaps the ultimate expression of this, but even at a more factual level - I could read a dozen books on a given religion, and although I might possess more in terms of historical fact or even theological argument, I'd still know less about it than somebody who was raised in that religion. Same with any profession, hobby, or craft.

Encoding the relationships between the words we use for different emotions in a vector space doesn't mean it knows the least thing about those emotions. Even though it can do an excellent job of convincing us that it does in a Turing test scenario.



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