I was so exasperated by the Donald Knuth thing the other day that I wrote this on a post about it:
There is a rhetorical move here supporting a metaphysical claim that conflates a human activity with the activity of a machine. This, again, is not scientific; it also demands explanation and justification that goes beyond presenting evidence. If someone rides a bicycle down the road, nobody says that the bicycle walked down the road. If someone flies a simulated plane from Boston to Chicago in a flight simulator, nobody says the person traveled to Chicago. Yet somehow when people think with the aid of a certain kind of AI machine, we're meant to refer to that as the machine doing the thing humans do (thinking, solving a problem, inventing, or what have you). We're meant to believe that what the machine is doing is not meaningfully different from what humans do despite the obvious layers of metaphor involved. This conflation is not scientific, it's metaphysical. It demands an explanation and justification that goes beyond just presenting evidence because it is making a claim about how the world works or is structured.