New Scientific Discovery - ChatGPT Is In Fact “Bullshit”!

[AgentPete]

I like this paper in “Ethics & Information Technology” a lot:

ChatGPT is bullshit - Ethics and Information Technology

It makes abundantly clear what many of us have known for a long time – that all the talk, hot air and excited hand-waving about “intelligence” is just grift-speak. Your computer / iPhone / whatever is no more “intelligent” with added-ChatGPT than your toaster is without it.

Actually, I’d argue that Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy is far more “intelligent” than anything that derivative ChatGPT can ever produce.

Depends on how you define “intelligence”, of course. Pretty broadly, in ChatGPT’s case.

The paper cited above makes it painfully clear that this is not real intelligence in any meaningful sense, and we are anthropomorphically wrong to use words such as “hallucinating” when the damn program is simply bullshitting.

Good for the scientists involved, I say.

 

[TimRees]

I recently watched an interview with David Bowie where he was told he was more intelligent than someone else (I can't remember who now), and his response was (not verbatim): It depends how you measure intelligence. As a creator, I just do... It comes from the heart and I don't think about it too much until i have to package it...

I found that interesting. Through my life I have learned that I process information differently to others around me and I think we are all unique in our looks and our thoughts, thus expressions... Will "individual" AI units ever be as unique as each human person is an individual?

This is a relevant interview segment from Bowie:

 

[Peyton Stafford]

Depends on how you define intelligence. An ability to understand and adapt to changing circumstances, rather than repeating strings of words that once worked. ChatGPT is Captain Queeg in the 21st century. I should add that AI is the cryptocurrency of the 2020s. And we all know about Sam Bankman-Fried.

 

[LJ Beck]

Depends on how you define intelligence.

Exactly.

There are different levels of AI. And some say "AI" has hit a wall in their level of intelligence.

I love the description in the article of these LLM programs as "Bullshit Machines" and the debate is if they're "soft bullshit machines" or "hard bullshit machines." hahaha!! That is super awesome.

@TimRees Will "individual" AI units ever be as unique as each human person is an individual? - Not for a very long while. Well, hopefully never. Other discoveries need to be made first, hardware like quantum computing, and a better understanding of what we're trying to get them to mimic... us. Our brains. We just don't know enough yet.

I thought this article was good. It goes through the levels of AI.
4 Main Types of Artificial Intelligence: Explained

One of the things it says is:
Understanding, as it's generally defined, is one of AI's huge barriers. [We have] The type of AI that can generate a masterpiece portrait still has no clue what it has painted. It can generate long essays without understanding a word of what it has said. An AI that has reached the theory of mind state would have overcome this limitation. This type of AI has yet to be developed.