skatesor

Again, it's all coming from somewhere. Humans can react to stimuli in the natural environment and produce sounds and turn them into words. GPT has to be spoonfed a dataset a human made at some point.

It's an inherently limited model of the human brain. It pretends biology and electrochemistry aren't playing some important role 'statistics' cannot. It's GPT which has to do more legwork to be compared to a human brain, not the other way around.

GPT doesn't have an 'understanding' class or a 'reasoning' function or whatever. It's a really well put together piece of statistics and sentences like these show it doesn't really have a concept of 'making sense'. You can use your much more advanced human brain to visibly see where it put in random variables (cigarette) and where it borrowed pieces of sentences (but it turned out to be too sour). You can see it made no connection between those two things that wasn't based on pure probability, and got it wrong anyway.

I'm not trying to be reductive, i like the model, it's just good to know the limitations of the tools you are using and to remember that it's not an independent thinker.

The article isn't really denying GPT's capabilities of copying human text in a way that can fool other humans. Most of the questions these days are just a matter of 'well, can it think for itself?' or 'is it good enough to use in my business without tweaking significantly?', so either philosophical or practical questions that are quite boring. Everyone has sort of moved on from the 'fooling humans' part because I guess it's not really all that interesting that feeding an AI several million webpages makes it eventually sound like it can write things that come from those webpages.

I mean, it said it's not.

You have to remember the AI cannot produce sentences or even words that someone else didn't already write. I'd totally agree it is 'aware' if it could meaningfully come to conclusions like these without getting them from someone else.

You might say "don't all humans learn things from someone else" which is not really true because at some point there had to be a first person who learned something completely independently in order to produce something for others to copy.