How is the impression of playfulness not a good faith interpretation?
You of course know that the model is not capable of thought or reasoning - only the appearance of them as needed to match its training corpus. A training corpus of completely human generated data. As such, how could anything it does, be anything but anthropomorphic?
Now, if this model were trained exclusively on a corpus of mathematical proofs stripped of natural language commentary, the expectation that you seem to have would be more appropriate.
A good point - I'm taking it as given that reasoning of any depth is more of an iterative process, with one thought advancing as a meta-cognitively guided feedback to the next until a conclusion is reached. One prompt->completion cycle from a language model wouldn't necessarily meet that definition, but I bet it could be a component in a system that tries to do so.
I aspire one day to find the free weekends and adequate hubris to build a benchtop implementation of Julian Jayne's Bicameral Mind with 1+N GPT-3 or GPT-neo instances prompting each other iteratively to see where the train of semantics wanders. (as I'm sure others have already)
You of course know that the model is not capable of thought or reasoning - only the appearance of them as needed to match its training corpus. A training corpus of completely human generated data. As such, how could anything it does, be anything but anthropomorphic?
Now, if this model were trained exclusively on a corpus of mathematical proofs stripped of natural language commentary, the expectation that you seem to have would be more appropriate.