The discussion on what constitutes intelligence and cognition is too vast and complex. The central point is that haphazard and unsubstantiated authromorphising language should be barred from scientific papers. We know that an LLM does not "know", "believe", "intent", or "feels" because they lack any form of integrated, general human-like intelligence. It is trivially correct to use different terms like "models", "predicts", "outputs emotive expressions" and avoid unevidenced claims of human behaviour.

I also wanted to nuance my opening post: I file the "don't humanise ML models"-comment of peer review under "minor issues". This means that it is an issue with the paper that does not prevent publication. This is not a hill I am willing to let good research die on.

Also, computation is not cognition. We need to focus on what distinguishes cognition from computation, if indeed these are distinct. I feel we are using the wrong words and thus having unproductive conversations regarding this topic (in general).