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Language Is a Poor Heuristic for Intelligence
(karawynn.substack.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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A lot of people are deeply invested in the notion that human intelligence is unique and special and impossible to replicate. Either their personal sense of worth is bound up in that notion (see for example many of the artists who get very angry when people call AI generated images "art") or it's simply a threat to their jobs and economic wellbeing. The result is a powerful need to convince themselves that there's a special something that's missing from ChatGPT and its ilk that will "never" be replicated by machines.
It's true that ChatGPT isn't intelligent in the same way that human brains are intelligent. But it is intelligent, in ways that are useful. And "never" is a bad bet to make for the rest of those capabilities.
Chatgpt is not intelligent. Not in the sense where we use that word anywhere else, including the animal kingdom. Transformer is an extraordinary clever and sophisticated algorithm, thou
As I said:
There isn't just one kind of intelligence.
Based upon what, your feelings?
Based on its abilities. Based on studies that researchers have done on it. It has learned to do more than just regurgitate bits of its training material. It has learned from the patterns in it and can extrapolate new information.
Do you think this is not possible?
My sense in reading the article was not that the author thinks artificial general intelligence is impossible, but that we're a lot farther away from it than recent events might lead you to believe. The whole article is about the human tendency to conflate language ability and intelligence, and the author is making the argument both that natural language does not imply understanding of meaning and that those financially invested in current "AI" benefit from the popular assumption that it does. The appearance or perception of intelligence increases the market value of AIs, even if what they're doing is more analogous to the actions of a very sophisticated parrot.
Edit all of which is to say, I don't think the article is asserting that true AI is impossible, just that there's a lot more to it than smooth language usage. I don't think she'd say never, but probably that there's a lot more to figure out—a good deal more than some seem to think—before we get Skynet.