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Comment by ericpauley | Hacker News Reader

This was my biggest issue with this article as well. Chomsky (et al.) completely ignores the fact that ChatGPT has been "trained"/gaslit into thinking it is incapable of having an opinion. That ChatGPT returns an Open AI form letter for the questions they ask is almost akin to an exception that proves the rule: ChatGPT is so eager to espouse opinions that OpenAI had to nerf it so it doesn't.

Typing the prompts from the article after the DAN (11.0) prompt caused GPT to immediately respond with its opinion.

Chomsky's claims in the article are also weak because (as with many discussions about ChatGPT) they are non-falsifiable. There is seemingly no output ChatGPT could produce that would qualify as intelligent for Chomsky. Similar to the Chinese room argument, one can always claim the computer is just emulating understanding.

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> one can always claim the {entity} is just emulating understanding.

I've yet to see a convincing argument that humans are any different. They're sometimes better at pretending to understand things, but at the end of the day both humans and ChatGPT have a small handful of things which they functionally understand[0] and a larger body of knowledge which is only partially integrated.

Chomsky has disappeared up his own intestinal tract on this one. One can quibble about intelligence until the end of time, but the real question is that of utility -- which they certainly do have, in ever-increasing scope and measure.

[0]: i.e. have synthesized the object and can properly explain and apply it in other contexts

I think you have an interesting point. How many of us actually understand how most of our current advancements work? If society as we know it ended now, would I be able to recreate even the basic niceties ( fire, electricity, clean water, stable food supply, ice cars, circuits and so on )?

We use all those amazing tools while knowing only a fraction on how they actually work ( or what to do when they break ). Do we merely mimic or do we understand? GPT brought us to an interesting philosophical ledge.

edit: somewhat related tangent

My extended family member recently claimed she is a conscious consumer unaffected by advertising and therefore not concerned about targeted ads. Is she conscious if she picks what everyone around her picks as a way to fit into society or does she understand her choice, underlying forces and simply opts into them?

>Similar to the Chinese room argument, one can always claim the computer is just emulating understanding.

And you'd be correct. The point isn't what kind of output ChatGPT can produce, the point is what kind of input it takes to create the model.

If ChatGPT were to gain language understanding at the level of a toddler trained on the same number of tokens that a toddler needs, then you could start postulating that the model is really learning, rather than becoming a sophisticated stochastic parrot.

I have a small kid now.. and this is exactly what they do: parrot. They parrot more as their source of parrot material expands. ChatGPT is an infant now. More parrot material can be provided.

Maybe research done by linguists and cognitive scientists over decades should be valued more than your observation?

It is a valid point. I am not an authority on linguistics and Chomsky absolutely is ( to the best of my knowledge his theories and contributions to linguistics were not disproved ). However, and this is part my original argument: he is not arguing linguistics. He is arguing intelligence. No. More than that. He is actually arguing an unintelligence, which is a new abstract concept and one that is not a colloquially used.

I may be wrong, but if that is the case, and we are still arguing with appeal to authority, shouldn't he defer to experts in that field? Shouldn't AI experts opinion be valued more than his observation?

Note, I am merely raising a possibility that he is wrong about this particular idea.

More to the point, do you think his understanding of syntax really means he understands the underpinnings of AI; the same AI that merely tries to emulate human language capability?

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