For the time being, I’m learning an interesting subject within the area of laptop science — pure language processing (NLP). Merely put, I’m attempting to grasp how a pc comprehends human language — or quite, how we will educate it to take action. Naturally, this brings me to the now-famous ChatGPT.
As I delved into the topic, I found that ChatGPT has no consciousness and nearly nothing that might be known as “intelligence.” Don’t get me unsuitable — I by no means believed it to be a residing being. However nonetheless, too many individuals in the present day deal with neural networks like deities. Who would have thought we’d severely be discussing the potential of changing components of humanity with robots and neural networks? Simply the label “AI” is sufficient to appeal to tens of millions in funding. And for what? For a fastidiously tuned mathematical algorithm that predicts the subsequent most possible phrase. Sure, in case you didn’t know — ChatGPT isn’t sitting there pondering deeply about your query, impressed by your perception. It’s simply choosing the subsequent doubtless phrase — no feelings, no reflections, no intentions.
Nonetheless, one open-ended query retains bothering me: will we really personal our concepts? Even when ChatGPT is only a mirror — a mirrored image of the phrases and ideas it has as soon as absorbed — does that make it unoriginal or incapable of producing one thing new? And the place do our personal concepts come from?
All ideas, concepts, and assumptions stem from information handed all the way down to us by others. Anybody you work together with — even briefly — can affect the way you suppose and what concepts come to you. It might look like we select who to take heed to, however can we actually say we make choices independently, if these choices are based mostly on a worldview formed by our environment? As my father says: an individual who’s been fed rotten tomatoes their complete life will consider that’s how tomatoes are imagined to style — and simply strive convincing them in any other case.
But when we obtain concepts from others, then the place do they get their ideas? The reply appears apparent — from different folks. A thought travels from individual to individual, mutating, being questioned, adapting — and solely then handed alongside. However what occurs once we dislike a thought or discover it unfounded? We reject it, and on the slightest point out, we would attempt to go on an “antidote” to it by arguing towards it. And so the thought evolves: it reproduces, the weaker variants die out, and the stronger ones unfold, altering the world. We, in flip, act as vessels, processors, and filters. Maybe our function is to help this evolution by cultivating concepts that make life higher. Not a foul reply to the query of life’s that means, is it?
Ultimately, it turns into clear: concepts reside organisms, continuously flowing via us, altering and gaining power the place they discover fertile floor. We might declare them as “ours,” however we solely really possess what we’re keen to nurture and go on. So, the true accountability — for each people and “mirror-machines” like ChatGPT — is identical: to be caring gardeners of ideas that make the world extra significant, truthful, and free.
