Researcher argues LLMs use 'cold reading' mechanics like psychic cons
A software researcher compares chat models' apparent intelligence to psychological manipulation tactics used by fortune tellers.
What to know
- Researcher argues LLMs exploit the Forer effect and cold reading tactics to create an illusion of intelligence, similar to psychic manipulation.
- The core claim: LLMs produce statistically generic responses that appear specific through validation statements, not through genuine reasoning or understanding.
- Hacker News discussion reveals fundamental disagreement about whether philosophical questions of 'true' intelligence matter versus practical utility of the outputs.
The dispute Whether LLMs possess real intelligence or problem-solving ability, or merely create a convincing illusion through statistical patterns—and whether this distinction matters for practical purposes. · positions read across 36 posts and comments
Intelligence and reasoning in LLMs are philosophical red herrings; what matters is whether they produce useful outputs.
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“I don't care if it's "intelligent", I don't care if it "has a mind"... None of this matters for the practical outcome.”
bonoboTP · Hacker News ↗
The article's definition of intelligence is too narrow and dismisses genuine capability; LLMs demonstrate real problem-solving abilities.
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“Man I remember back when a psychic conned me by solving the Navier-Stokes problem.”
rahidz · Hacker News ↗
The article's reasoning conflates mechanism with capability; the analogy to psychic cons doesn't hold because LLMs actually solve problems.
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“A language model responds to inputs exactly as a model of anything else would. That is enough to explain all the "intelligence" without believing a model is somehow a "new kind of mind".”
vhantz · Hacker News ↗
jalev Software researcher and AI criticTerence Eden Blogger
How it unfolded 1 development · click the chart to see its coverage articlespostscomments
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Article resurfaces on Hacker News, sparking debate over LLM intelligence definitions
The piece reached the Hacker News front page with 122 points and 149 comments. Discussion immediately turned to disagreements about what constitutes intelligence, whether the framing is dated, and the practical utility of LLMs regardless of philosophical questions about their cognition.
“LLMs are a mathematical model of language tokens. You give a LLM text, and it will give you a mathematically plausible response to that text.”
— jalev · source -
I feel like this post completely misses the point, pretty much across the board. And it does so by repeating the same mistake that everybody keeps making - conflating mechanism and function.One of the issues in during this research—one that has perplexed me—has been that many people are convinced that language models, or specifically chat-based…
2 more of the top 3 · 36 posts in this stretch
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‘How Chat-Based Large Language Models Replicate the Mechanisms of a Psychic’s Con’ https:// jagsworkshop.com/2026/09/llms- replicate-psychic-con/
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My biggest issue isn't being too agreeable (ie the psychic con), it's being confidently wrong, including outright hallucinations.If you ask a common question to an LLM with unusual qualifiers, it tends to ignore the qualifiers and give you the typical answer. I saw a demonstration of this with the whole "the surgeon is my mother" "puzzle" that…
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background
Researcher publishes 'Intelligence Illusion' analysis comparing LLMs to psychic cons — Software researcher jalev published a detailed post arguing that chat-based LLMs replicate the mechanisms of psychic cold reading. The researcher contends that LLMs use validation statements and the Forer effect to create an impression of intelligence and specific engagement, but that these answers are actually statistically generic.
Also covered reported alongside — the timeline has no entry for these yet
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first by HN Best, 6d ago · also HN Frontpage
What people are saying 21 voices from 1 site · best of 36 · verbatim
- Has the author updated this view since 2023, given advances in LLM capabilities?
- If defining intelligence requires certain mechanisms (like matrix multiplication in brains), does that definition exclude human intelligence too?
- Is the psychic con analogy actually applicable to systems that solve hard mathematical problems?
- Sep 21
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I would understand to read this kind of articles in 2023ish, but for what they can do now... It is not even if they are "intelligent" is what intelligence even is. I think it is undeniable that there is a level of capacity increasing with each new model, and how would you call that? There is an illusion in LLM's, but that illusion, in my point of…
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> The tech industry has accidentally invented the initial stages a completely new kind of mind, based on completely unknown principles, using completely unknown processes that have no parallel in the biological world.This is just false? Language emerged from biology, we've brute forced some version of that model. Knowing that this is a new kind of…
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> I don't care if it's "intelligent", I don't care if it "has a mind"...Agreed. The AI is useful for the particular tasks that it proves itself useful for. And if it occasionally spits out a claim that it is "genuinely curious" about a piece of research that I will have to do myself because it turned out to be beyond its mechanical capabilities…
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The article starts interestingly; I like the analogy between cold reading and LLM responses (well, the ones we were getting three years ago). Then it goes on to generalise to the tune of "This new era of tech seems to be built on superstition and pseudoscience" which I think was a conclusion better left to the reader.We are used to articles, blogs…
- Sep 20
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The LLMentalist Effect (2023) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42983571 - Feb 2025 (133 comments)Chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36586540 - July 2023 (13 comments)
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I think you are majorly overstating OP that ai "didn't work". In fact I agree with the post on almost all aspects and I'd be the last to tell you ai doesn't work. It absolutely does but with a caveat... It's still a tool. And better expertise in the problem domain, along with a better harness used for verifiable outputs will get you better…
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> Delegating your decision-making, ranking, assessment, strategising, analysis, or any other form of reasoning to a chatbot becomes the functional equivalent to phoning a psychic for advice.Lots of comments talking about how recent accomplishments disprove the article but I think this bit holds up pretty well.LLMs are very good at tricking people…
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I’m on your side. Zoltan provides an experience and that’s all that matters. If it works for you, why does anyone else care that the economy is riding on its success?
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I don’t understand why people jump so readily to seeing intelligence here. Science fiction has as a core, central trope that humans will debase and devalue other types of life they do not understand. Even the storied Commander Data has to fight for the right to self-determination (probably the best episode of STTNG by the way - ‘The Measure of a…
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Turing was addressing the question of "Can machines think?" and his point was that the question itself is a meaningless one, and that we should stop wasting time by even giving it the light of day.He proposes his game grounded on functional equivalence, then goes through a slew of objections on the question of 'Can Machines think?'. It's a…
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People also misunderstand the bar that was set by the test. It was more subtle than “Can the computer convincingly carry one side of a dialogue?”His “imitation game” had three participants: a human participant, a computer participant, and an interrogator. The interrogator’s job was to talk to the participants and try to determine which participant…
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I’m not sure acceptance buys you much. “Well-informed plan” at this stage feels like a useless exercise. It is changing fast, and the world only needs so many electricians. Besides, I don’t think “accepting” the fact that these big companies are pillaging human contribution and selling it back to us is good, even if “it works”.
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The con is in how all those accomplishments have been presented to you. "Our LLM (not the one we let you use, a different one) did this amazing thing. No, we won't show you what training data we used, what prompts we used, what the harness was, how much human involvement there was, what hardware was involved, how much energy it took, or how much…
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I don't think it's a "con," but I find that using the mental model of LLMs being sophisticated, lossy search engines of knowledge can help us separate some of the factors more cleanly than imagining that they have cognition or intelligence.It's hard for me to imagine a stateless operation as intelligence per se, though perhaps the chaining of such…
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Actually, there are material differences in the practical outcomes of using AI or not. Proofs don’t confer understanding. AI prose and “art” is materially different than human made.There is a difference between you not liking something and it being wrong. Maybe think about that with your grey matter.
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I don't care if it's "intelligent", I don't care if it "has a mind". I don't care if it is "really reasoning", I don't care if it "understands". I don't care if it is "sentient" or "conscious".None of this matters for the practical outcome.You'd think that this has been understood over the last 4 years, but apparently it keeps circling back to…
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Interesting to me is the tension between remarks along the lines that this post maybe made sense in 2023, but not today, or how LLMs clearly show intelligence by solving Navier-Stokes, et cetera; versus the comments I read here often as well: "it's just a tool".I can't quite put my finger on it, but aren't these two statements add odds with each…
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> LLMs are not brains and do not meaningfully share any of the mechanisms that animals or people use to reason or thinkLLMs are a type of neural network. We know that’s how the human brain works, at least directionally. It’s going to be very upsetting to a lot of people when we figure out that the brain is just a neural network. Akin to when we…
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Building up strawmen against LLMs will only make the hypers look more reasonable. A language model responds to inouts exactly as a model of anything else would. That is enough to explain all the "intelligence" without believing a model is somehow a "new kind of mind". Those who think LLMs are intelligent don't know enough about models. And those…
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The challenge here is in trying to decide whether LLMs are intelligent or have a mind. Famously, the criteria for intelligence seem to slip with each advancement in technology. But going back to Turing, his test was actually more carefully phrased than we remember: he said that when machines could pass the test, the question of whether they are…
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> many people are convinced that language models, or specifically chat-based language models, are intelligent. But there isn’t any mechanism inherent in large language models (LLMs) that would seem to enable thisSeems like we can just stop reading here right? The author seems to have made up their mind that this very open question is closed, or at…