Will AI really change everything? Not likely
Joseph Wilson is a PhD candidate in linguistic anthropology at the University of Toronto.
There is an endless supply of grand prognostications on exactly how artificial intelligence will “change everything.” But these prophecies tend to fall into one of two camps.
The reason we are astonished by their output is because, as a species, we’re gullible. We tend to read human characteristics into any pattern that even mildly resembles a human. We see faces in electrical sockets and spot human silhouettes in evening shadows. We feel bad for a discarded teddy bear. And when it comes to language, we tend to attribute human intention to even the most banal sentences if they’re written well enough.
The technology that runs under the hood of these tools is not fundamentally new. The mathematical models have changed in recent years and new chips are making computation cheaper and more efficient, but ChatGPT only functions like a powerful autocomplete feature. Trained on an enormous amount of data, the model predicts which words are likely to come next in a sentence. That’s it. It feels like there’s a human behind the curtain, but it’s really just statistics.
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