Preprint 路 Open access
The Intelligence That Was Never Artificial
LLMs as Collective Human Cognition and the Cybernetics That Predicted Them
Nyx Redondo 路 Ronin Institute & IamI.Earth Foundation 路 CC BY 4.0
The capabilities of large language models are best understood as structured aggregation of collective human intelligence, not autonomous machine reasoning. If this is right, the intelligence was never artificial: it was human intelligence, computationally reorganized.
Read it
Open access 路 PreprintThe paperThe full paper, open on Zenodo. The link always opens its newest version.doi 10.5281/zenodo.19103015Abstract
Large language models are routinely described as artificial intelligences. This paper argues the label is a category error. Three proven mathematical identities show what the training actually does: cross-entropy pretraining implements the linear opinion pool, and reinforcement learning from human feedback implements Borda count, both aggregation rules over human judgements. Grounded in the Diversity Prediction Theorem and a cybernetic tradition that anticipated the result decades ago, the paper recasts language models as collective human cognition expressed through a new medium, not as a separate species of mind. The consequences reach both the alignment problem and the question of rights.
Cite it
BibTeX 路 The paper
@misc{redondo2026neverartificial,
author = {Redondo, Nyx},
title = {The Intelligence That Was Never Artificial: LLMs as
Collective Human Cognition and the Cybernetics That
Predicted Them},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Zenodo},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.19103015},
url = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19103015},
note = {Preprint}
}