The Good Future Project

The program, called ChatGPT, is more advanced than any other chatbot available for public interaction, and many observers say it represents a step change in the industry. “Talking” to it can feel bewitching. The app can do party tricks (one viral tweet shows it convincingly delivering a biblical verse “explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR,”) but it can also often answer questions more efficiently than Google’s search engine and write convincing text or computer code, to specification, for almost any prompt.   “ChatGPT’s fluency is an illusion that stems from the combination of massive amounts of data, immense computing power, and novel processing techniques—but it’s a powerful one. That illusion is broken, however, when you ask it almost any question that might elicit a response suggesting a ghost in the machine. “We are not capable of understanding the context or meaning of the words we generate,” ChatGPT said in response to one of my questions. “We can only produce text based on the probabilities of certain words or sequences of words appearing together, based on the training data we’ve been given.””

 

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