The first wave of ChatGPT stories were all "amazing, wonderful, humanity is basically obsolete". But now that people have had a little time, I'm seeing a ton of examples where people are realizing that ChatGPT sounds like it knows what it's talking about, but actually doesn't know anything.
We know that humans are easily fooled by glib confidence; we can all think of politicians who have succeeded that way. But it sounds like ChatGPT's real innovation is something that produces synthetic bullshit. And here I'm using Frankfurt's definition, "speech intended to persuade without regard for truth": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
ChatGPT does some really impressive stuff! As a creative tool or a code generator it can give you some good material to work with.
But the hype has been insane, totally untethered from reality. I think it's the instinct to assume that something which can mimic human speech quite well must also have some mechanism for comprehending the meaning of the words it's generating, when it really doesn't.
True. And the really interesting question for me is how much those people are also failing to notice this distinction not just with ChatGPT, but with other people. Which sounds absurd at first, but long ago Oliver Sacks gave an example that sticks with me: https://www.junkfoodforthought.com/long/Sacks_Reagan.htm
The first wave of ChatGPT stories were all "amazing, wonderful, humanity is basically obsolete". But now that people have had a little time, I'm seeing a ton of examples where people are realizing that ChatGPT sounds like it knows what it's talking about, but actually doesn't know anything.
We know that humans are easily fooled by glib confidence; we can all think of politicians who have succeeded that way. But it sounds like ChatGPT's real innovation is something that produces synthetic bullshit. And here I'm using Frankfurt's definition, "speech intended to persuade without regard for truth": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit