ChatGPT is an algorithm. It was trained on millions of text examples gleaned from the internet (literally everything with associated metadata so that the text could be classified). It very likely chewed through Maureen Dowd’s entire œuvre along the way.It barfs out convincing text that is sometimes meaningful, because it was trained on billions of sentences written by sentient human beings. It sometimes vomits meaningless sentences. It doesn’t know the difference because it doesn’t know ANYTHING.Since we don’t really understand what understanding is , so we can’t build it into a machine. And we may never be able to do that.Here’s what we CAN do : spend billions of dollars making a machine that mindlessly fabricates human-sounding blather. Since many people (especially young ones) can’t even write a coherent paragraph, ChatGPT could indeed put people out of work. Or spend hundreds of billions to make a car that drives itself. Sort of. Maybe as well as an elderly person. But ‘good enough’ to put people out of work.Hundreds of billions of dollars to replicate ONE activity that most human beings can do with ease. And people wonder why the pace of major  scientific discovery has slowed recently. How much of our resources are invested into putting people out of work, so that a small elite can further increase their stranglehold over the rest of us?Ms Dowd, you should have asked the boy geniuses some tougher questions.

ChatGPT is an algorithm. It was trained on millions of text examples gleaned from the internet (literally everything with associated metadata so that the text could be classified). It very likely chewed through Maureen Dowd’s entire œuvre along the way.It barfs out convincing text that is sometimes meaningful, because it was trained on billions of sentences written by sentient human beings. It sometimes vomits meaningless sentences. It doesn’t know the difference because it doesn’t know ANYTHING.Since we don’t really understand what understanding is , so we can’t build it into a machine. And we may never be able to do that.Here’s what we CAN do : spend billions of dollars making a machine that mindlessly fabricates human-sounding blather. Since many people (especially young ones) can’t even write a coherent paragraph, ChatGPT could indeed put people out of work. Or spend hundreds of billions to make a car that drives itself. Sort of. Maybe as well as an elderly person. But ‘good enough’ to put people out of work.Hundreds of billions of dollars to replicate ONE activity that most human beings can do with ease. And people wonder why the pace of major  scientific discovery has slowed recently. How much of our resources are invested into putting people out of work, so that a small elite can further increase their stranglehold over the rest of us?Ms Dowd, you should have asked the boy geniuses some tougher questions.

user
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assistant