this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
198 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37737 readers
593 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
My gripe with the Chinese room is that Searle argues that his inability to understand Chinese means the program doesn't understand Chinese, but I could say the same thing about the human body.
The neurons that operate your vocal chords have no idea what they're saying, nor the ones in your hands any idea what they're writing, yet they can speak and write exactly because your brain tells them what to do. Your brain is exactly like that book as far as your mouth and hand neurons are concerned.
They don't need to understand language at all for your brain to be able to understand it and give instructions based on that understanding.
My only argument is at what point does an algorithm become sufficiently advanced that it is indistinguishable from a conscious being?
Because at the end of the day, most of what a brain does is information processing based on what it has previously learnt, and that's exactly what the algorithm is doing based on training data. A sufficient enough algorithm should surely be able to replicate understanding.
Sure, that isn't ChatGPT as we know it, as you can tell from its sometimes very zany responses that while it understands what words are valid responses, it doesn't understand what the words themselves mean, but we should reach that at some point, no?
Keep in mind ChatGPT is a language model. It's designed specifically to simulate sounding like a human. It does that... Okay. It doesn't understand the information or concepts it is using. It just sounds like it does. It can't reliably do basic maths and doesn't try or need to. It just needs to talk about it in a believably conversational way.
The brain does far more than process information. And ChatGPT doesn't even really do that.
That's just utter nonsense. ChatGPT by every definition of the word very much understands a lot of what it is talking about. People complaining about ChatGPT not "understanding" seems to have a hard time grasping how insanely difficult it is to produce natural language answers and how much you need to understand of the context to do so successfully.
Neither can many humans, but my $5 calculator is great at it. There are without a doubt a lot of things that ChatGPT can't do, sometimes fundamentally so, like math. It can't do loops and it doesn't even get to see the digits of the numbers it should calculate on, so not a terribly big surprise that it can't do math very well. English language, and a whole bunch of other ones, on the other side, that it understands surprisingly well.
Basically, if you want to complain about ChatGPT, complain about things it actually gets wrong, saying "it doesn't understand" just makes you sound like a parrot and note even a clover one.
While it's humorous how personally you are taking critiques of, chatGPT, it is unfortunate you are also demonstrating a fundamental lack of basic understanding of how ChatGPT works. Because of that, you have inflated what you believe chatGPT is doing.
Even when it gets basic maths wrong repeatedly. Because I can tell it 2+2=5 and it will agree with me. Conversationally. Since it has no concept of what 2+2=5 means.
Even though it has no memory of previous conversations, you believe it somehow retains understanding of concepts it discusses.
Even though it searches the internet to provide it the knowledge to answer questions, which is why it can cite sources that don't exist or don't support its claims, clearly demonstrating a fundamental lack of understanding the concept, or even the concept of citing sources.
Even though it was literally trained by humans telling it what the three most correct conversational response would be out of the 5 answers it gave every calibration question, you still believe it actually possesses intelligence above any human, who can have a conversation without making any of these mistakes.
I clearly put chatGPT "intelligence" as remarkably low as is possible, even non-existent. I also must concede in this situation it is smarter than at least one human I am aware of.
That's because I see idiotic takes on AI every day and it gets annoying. Most people criticizing ChatGPT haven't even bothered to test the things they complain about, but just parrot along stuff they heard elsewhere.
You have a fundamental lack of understanding how ChatGPT work apparently. ChatGPT gets math wrong because it never sees the digits. Everything is tokens to ChatGPT. What ChatGPT is doing is like trying to do math with a dictionary, it fundamentally doesn't work because numbers are not words and there is no dictionary large enough to hold all the numbers in existence. The surprising part isn't that ChatGPT gets math wrong, but how much of it it gets correct despite the odds being stacked against it. Also small stuff like 2+2 it gets almost always correct. Models that operate on characters are in the works.
It can handle a ~2000-25000 word text prompt. Everything in there it has a reasonably good chance of understanding, everything not it there doesn't exist at all from ChatGPTs viewpoint. The fact that it can't remember previous discussions is completely irrelevant to the matter if it can understand or not.
It doesn't. ChatGPT never had Internet access.
Here is the fun part: It cites plausible sounding non-existing sources because it understands, it has to to accomplish that. Imagining plausible future states of the world is impossible without having a solid understanding of how the world works. That those future states are imaginary comes from a lack of feedback and interaction with the real world, not from a lack of understanding. ChatGPT can't tell you if a book exists in the real world, it has no access to a library, but it can tell you what makes a plausible name for a book.
If it can't see numbers, then it isn't as smart as your $5 calculator or the majority of the human race. If you can convince it it's wrong, it's even more distinctly less intelligent.
It barely passes as a language model and only passes as a conversational model. Having citations doesn't mean it understands citations. Having incorrect citations quite simply proves that it doesn't understand what a citation is meant for. It does not understand the concept.
ChatGPT is pre trained on a number of directories. All of them sampled pre 2021. Nothing after that date exists for chatGPT. That isn't intelligence. It doesn't possess the intelligence to understand the nature of its databases. And if you really don't think the databases it was trained on came from the internet, please show us a source.
It's continually entertaining how you continue to point out the substantial limitations of a language model AI and yet insist it's showing more intelligence than an average brain that's has none of those limitations and achieves more accurate and better results any minute of every day. And then claiming it understands concepts when that concept itself is not part of its architecture is really astounding. I can almost identify the exact neuron that's misfiring in your brain.