“obviously of different kinds”

What’s your basis for that “obviously”? You have a unique insight of the phenomenology of duck-ness? You can prove that your consciousness is somehow real, somehow different? A duck synthesises with its cognition, or it would be incapable of, well, anything. Synthesis is purely the process of the integration of inputs into outputs - ie behaviour, language.

Here’s an article on a paper on duck synthesis:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/ducklings-make-way-abst...

“objectively different levels of computational sophistication”

Says who? We still have a very poor understanding of how cognition works in animals, humans included. For all we know ducks have rich inner lives - a remarkable amount can be achieved with a very small neurone count - cf. insects. Can you coordinate flight? Can you echolocate? Are you less intelligent because you cannot?

“equivocation of "mentorship" as "prompting" and fallacious variants thereof”

You are arguing semantics. Take Harry Nyquist. He sent people down new paths with insightful questions. You could call this mentorship if you choose, I could call it prompting, but this splits hairs. The core idea is that a novel input can produce a novel output, that synthesis can be induced through guided and deliberate external input.

I invoked credentials only in response to the previous derogatory comments about my cognition - which may or may not exist, anyway.

As to religiosity - the idea that human cognition is somehow unique and special and impossible to replicate, which is the prevailing argument in this comment tree is religious, and anthropocentrism of the highest order. I apologise for accusing you of it - I was evidently wrong - I had mistaken you for a previous poster.

You're wrong about the ducks. But getting back to your previous wrong argument from 14 hours ago, you basically deny the meaning of terms like "uninspired", "insipid", and "derivative", on the grounds that we're all standing on the shoulders of giants and therefore it's all good. This is incorrect, it's not all good, and the things the LLMs do really are unoriginal, a term that really does mean something.