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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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But if you press them on the topic, or actually look at chess games that GPT has played it becomes readily apparent that GPT makes a lot of stupid and occasionally outright illegal moves (eg moving rooks diagonally, attacking it's own pieces, etc...). What this demonstrates is that GPT does not "know how to play chess" at all.

Imagine a blind person, without any sense of touch or proprioception, who has only heard people talk about playing chess. They have never seen a chessboard, never picked up a rook, and the mere concept of moving pieces is completely foreign to their sensorium.

And yet, when pressed, said person is able to play mostly legal moves, all the while holding the entire state of the board in their head. Correspondence chess via Chinese telephone.

I think anyone who witnessed such a feat would be justified in being highly impressed, whereas you happen to be the equivalent of someone complaining that a talking dog isn't a big deal because it has an atrocious accent, whereas Yudkowsky et al are rightly pointing out that you can't find a better way of critiquing a talking dog! Especially a talking dog that gets ever more fluent with additional coaching, to the point that it knows more medicine than I do, understands quite complicated math, and in general does a better job of being a smart human than the average human does.

In a park people come across a man playing chess against a dog. They are astonished and say: "What a clever dog!" But the man protests: "No, no, he isn't that clever. I'm leading by three games to one!"