Psychology Today spotlights a paper arguing LLMs do not think like humans
ValerioCapraro · x · 2026-07-22
A paper discussed in Psychology Today argues that large language models do not think like humans and outlines seven “fault lines” between human intelligence and LLMs.
- Grounding fault: humans start from the world; LLMs start from encoded inputs.
- Parsing fault: humans recognize objects and situations; LLMs segment tokens.
- Experience fault: humans rely on lived episodes; LLMs on statistical regularities.
- Motivation / causality / metacognition / value faults: humans have internal goals, causal reasoning, uncertainty awareness, and values; LLMs generate outputs from learned patterns and external objectives.
The authors push a stronger claim: humans are alive and teleological, while AI is ateleological—capable of pursuing assigned goals, but not originating or caring about them. They describe the bias of assuming similar language implies similar minds as “LLMmorphism.”
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