Can large language models take the place of traditional search engines? For us to have confidence in them, we would need to know that they haven’t been fed propaganda and conspiracy theories—we’d need to know that the jpeg is capturing the right sections of the Web. But, even if a large language model includes only the information we want, there’s

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ChatGPT’s appearance of humanlike intelligence, she and others point out, is a mirage. The narcotized text it produces is only a recombination of whatever corpora it consumes; LLMs, Bender argues, should be seen as “stochastic parrots” and “synthetic text extruding machines.” Where real thinking involves organic associations, speculative leaps, and... See more

In a widely cited study by MIT researchers published in June, participants who wrote SAT-style essays with the assistance of ChatGPT engaged a narrower spectrum of neural networks while writing, struggled to accurately quote what they had just written, and—thanks to generative AI’s inbuilt tendency toward cliché—used the same handful of refried... See more