[tshadley]

"I cannot emphasize this enough: ChatGPT is not generating meaning. It is arranging word patterns."

To reconcile this statement with his admission that ChatGPT reliably turns out passable results, we must assume the average student simply rearranges word patterns as well. So developmentally, this must be a mile marker on the road to competence.

"[Writing] is an embodied process that connects me to my own humanity, by putting me in touch with my mind"

ChatGPT's experiences with its own "mind" are fleeting and lost forever with each reset of prompt and zeroing of prompt history. Prompt compression and embedding architectures, combined with the steady growth of hardware memory capacity, should allow new models that continuously generate and process "thought" prompts. This should allow the primitive emergence of self-narratives and make a leap, I feel, towards the generation of true meaning.

[jpttsn]

These conclusions seem premature.

> To reconcile this statement with his admission that ChatGPT reliably turns out passable results, we must assume the average student simply rearranges word patterns as well.

Alternative explanation: the “passable results” test does not distinguish between ”rearrange word patterns” and whatever the students might otherwise be up to.

> So developmentally, this must be a mile marker on the road to competence.

Alternative: the students with passable results are not on the way to competence

Other alternative: it is a mile marker for students but not for the AI (just as learning to walk mile be a mile marker for human babies on the way to baseball playing, but not for foals, who learn fast to walk and never to play baseball).