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To expand my point, I think there is a smooth continuity between "babbling" and "conveying meaning" that hinges on what I'd call "sustained coherency". With humans, we started out conceptualizing meaning, modelling things in our head, and then evolved language in order to reflect and externalize these things; we (presumably) got coherence first. AI is going the other way: it starts out swimming in a soup of meaning-fragments (even Markov chains learn syllables), and as our technology improves it assembles them into longer and longer coherent chains. GPT-2 was coherent at the level of half-sentences or sentences, GPT-3 can be coherent at levels spanning paragraphs. It occasionally loses the plot and switches universes, giving up on one cluster of assembled meaning-fragments as it cannot generate a viable continuation and slipping smoothly into another. But the "sort of thing that it builds" with words, the assemblage of fragments into chains of meaning, is the same sort of thing that we build with language. It's coming at the same spot (months/years-long sustained coherency) from another evolutionary direction.
You may argue "it's all meaningless without attachment to reality." And sure, that's not wrong! But once the assemblage operates correctly, attaching meaning to it will just be a matter of cross-training. (And the unsolved problem of the "artificial self", though if ever there was a problem amenable to a purely narrative solution...)
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I disagree.
Can you give an example that you think illustrates your point well? (I don't have ChatGPT access. Giving out my phone number? Ugh.)
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A few moments ago, while looking for a quote by James Baldwin*, I turned to Chat GPT for help. I used the prompt, "...It describes his anger towards the white man and his interest in white women.""
It gave me the following quote:
"No black man has ever been able to seriously consider the white woman without having to grapple with the ancient myth of the wide-eyed, agile and demanding Eve, who offers him the poisoned apple of forbidden sexuality, the apple of his own destruction." - James Baldwin.
As far as I can tell this quote was fabricated wholesale. A God of words is being birthed, and conscious or not Ze will change the world entirely.
"And there is, I should think, no Negro living in America who has not felt, briefly or for long periods, with anguish sharp or dull, in varying degrees and to varying effect, simple, naked and unanswerable hatred; who has not wanted to smash any white face he may encounter in a day, to violate, out of motives of the cruelest vengeance, their women, to break the bodies of all white people and bring them low, as low as that dust into which he himself has been and is being trampled..."
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