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Their wordsI am profoundly troubled by today’s large language models, such as GPT-4. I find them repellent and threatening to humanity, partly because they are inundating the world with fakery, as is exemplified by the piece of text produced by the ersatz Hofstadter.
Their wordsLarge language models, although they are astoundingly virtuosic and mind-bogglingly impressive in many ways, do not think up original ideas; rather, they glibly and slickly rehash words and phrases “ingested” by them in their training phase, which draws on untold millions of web sites, books, articles, etc.
Their wordsAt first glance, the products of today’s LLM’s may appear convincing and true, but one often finds, on careful analysis, that they fall apart at the seams.
Their wordsto me it makes no sense whatsoever to let the artificial voice of a chatbot, chatting randomly away at dazzling speed, replace the far slower but authentic and reflective voice of a thinking, living human being.
Their wordsTo fall for the illusion that vast computational systems “who” have never had a single experience in the real world outside of text are nevertheless perfectly reliable authorities about the world at large is a deep mistake, and, if that mistake is repeated sufficiently often and comes to be widely accepted, it will undermine the very nature of truth on which our society—and I mean all of human society—is based.
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