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But ultimately, what makes our lives meaningful is the empathy and intent we get from human interactions — people responding to one another. With AI, he says: “It feels like there’s someone on the other end. But there isn’t.”  

Chiang believes that language without the intention, emotion and purpose that humans bring to it becomes meaningless. “Language is a way of facilitating interactions with other beings. That is entirely different than the sort of next-token prediction, which is what we have [with AI tools] now.”

Chiang’s view is that large language models (or LLMs), the technology underlying chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, are useful mostly for producing filler text that no one necessarily wants to read or write, tasks that anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs”. AI-generated text is not delightful, but it could perhaps be useful i