Generative AI challenges us intellectually. John Searle at Berkeley talked about the Chinese Room argument. ( It says that no matter how smart a computer seems, it can’t have human consciousness.–Ed ) Well, the Chinese Room showed up. I recently gave an example. I used Google to give me a Chinese output for: “Who is Ai Weiwei?”

“On the Biology of a Large Language Model”) details what the team discovered when it looked at 10 tasks in particular.

All this ultra-processing gives rise to a quandary: it was our language training and our feedback that created the vocabularies of the bots. When did the tables turn? What remains of that beautiful pig in the past? AI responses now commonly include AI-generated content: AIs converse with other AIs, LLM-generated content is fed into the training of... See more