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> "it's more likely your the one excessively projecting a lack of intelligence behind chatGPT. Pareidolia is you, because you're the one following the common trope. It takes extra thinking and an extra step to go beyond that." It takes no thinking at all to hug a stuffed toy, or to anthropomorphise a cat or dog and attribute human motivations and intelligence to them. It's generally frowned upon to suggest that the horse licking the hand is looking for the taste of salt and not showing love and affection of its owner. Humans see intelligence everywhere especially where it's scary - an animal screech in the woods or out at sea and bam, witches, sirens, werewolf shapeshifters, Bigfoot, the Banshee, aliens, Sagan's "Demon Haunted World" - human level malevolent intelligence projected into a couple of noises. People were fooled by the Mechanical Turk[1], people are fooled by conjouring trick magic with only a couple of movements made non-obvious, in recent years an Eliza quality basic chatbot passed a Turing test at British The Royal Society[2] largely by exploiting this effect pretending to be a Ukranian 13 year old so the testers would give it the benefit of the doubt for poor quality answers and poor use of English. (The other side of that is that if I could only pass a Turing Test in English, I couldn't pass one in Ukranian, so maybe I'm not sentient in Ukranian?) That is, I think it's better to err on being hard to convince, rather than to err by being convinced too easily. > "I'm not saying chatGPT understands everything. I'm saying it can understand many things." If we see understanding not as a boolean toggle, but as a scale, and different levels in different areas, I think I'm coming round to agreeing with you, it has non-zero understanding in some areas, it has raised the understanding bar off the ground in some areas, there is some glow of understanding to it. The more I try to argue it, the more I come round to "a human should be able to X" which ChatGPT can actually do. Multiplication - a pocket calculator can do it quickly and accurately but does not understand the pattern. Why doesn't it understand? Because it can't explain the pattern, can't transfer the pattern to anything else. A human can't do mental arithmetic as fast or as accurately as a pocket calculator but can talk about the pattern, can explain it, can transfer the pattern and reuse it in different ways demonstrating that the pattern exists separate from the for-loop that does calculating. See this ChatGPT example: https://i.imgur.com/jc58Fqu.png it has transferred the pattern of multiplication from arabic numerals to tallied symbols and then with minimal prompting, to different symbols. I carried on, prompted it with a new operation called blerp and gave three examples of blerp 10 = 15, blerp 20 = 30, blerp 100 = 150 and asked what was blerp of {stone stone stone stone}. ChatGPT inferred that the pattern was multiply by 1.5, and transferred it to stones, back to numerals, gave me the right answer, in a way that a pocket calculator could never do, but a human could easily do. That's a pattern for multiplying separate from a for-loop in an evaluator, right? If I say that a human speaking from a Spanish phrasebook does not understand Spanish, and someone who does understands it a little can go off phrasebook a bit, someone who understands it a lot can go as far as you like. ChatGPT can go off phrasebook in English extremely well and very far, and make text which is coherent, more or less on topic, novel, can give word-play examples and speculate on words that don't actually exist. Does it have 'true understanding', whatever that is, as a Boolean yes/no? No. Does it have 'more understanding' than an AI decision tree of yesteryear, than a pocket calculator, than an Eliza chatbot, than a Spanish phrasebook, than Stockfish chess minmaxer? ...yes? yes. Non-zero understanding. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk [2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/computer-chatbot-eugene-goostm... |
There are things we understand and things we don't.
Same with chatGPT. This is new. Because prior to this, a computer literally had, in your words, zero understanding.
I think the thing that throws everyone off is the fact that things that are obviously understood by humans are in many cases not understood by chatGPT. But the things chatgpt does understand are real and have never been seen before till now.
The virtual machine example I posted is just one aspect of something it does understand and imo, it's not a far leap to get it to understand more.