Artificial Intelligence - AI -ChatGPT
All the talk today is this AI machine/computer that can research and write. This commentary is influenced by recent conversations and a WSJ article, “ChatGPT Heralds an Intellectual Revolution,” by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher (2/27/2023). Quotes are from the referenced article.
This AI device is a massive information gathering tool, able to write and share the collected information in sentences and paragraphs humans can read. Understanding is another issue. Over the past many generations written books, articles, encyclopedias, all manner of information and data has been digitized and stored, made accessible via the internet and various search engines. With enough computer power and speedy access to the worldwide web a question asked can be researched, information compared, ingested and digested, and an answer provided in nano-specs. The generated piece can appear as a written work, albeit not by a human. Consider it a super-text-generator, not just words completing a sentence you may write, or suggested words that may follow what you are writing. It composes complete sentences and paragraphs. Accuracy of the material may be questioned, should be questioned, not necessarily of the collected data, but by any reliance that the source material itself is real, and factual. The fallacy becomes that of GIGO - garbage in - garbage out.
ChatGPT - The GPT = Generative Pre-training Transformer. Yes, the machine is in training. And it is chatty.
This AI technology can converse, as it were, with humans, as long as questions are asked. Humans ask, the machine in split seconds researches, reviews and answers. It is as SIRI answering by not just sending you to a website. From the printing press making human written records or thought available to multitudes, such as the Bible in 1453, this digitized powerful computer search engine and answer/words generator makes almost everything ever recorded, in word or possibly speech, available to the ChatGPT user. All human knowledge is conceivably at your fingertips; billions of items accessed and distilled faster than human consciousness could do it, even a collection of human conscious minds. It is fascinating that the text generated is literate - at least to those that can read. How the machine learns is a conundrum. But can it think? Can it reason?
“Inherently, highly complex, AI furthers human knowledge, but not human understanding.” The human is still needed, as human reasoning need apply.
“Generative AI is … poised to generate a new form of consciousness, as yet, however, the opportunity exists in colors for which we have no spectrum and in directions for which we have no compass.”
ChatGPT incorporates data generation along with language models, but the information generated provides no sources, such as authors, speakers, or the written work from which it was obtained. It can plagiarize or rewrite. There is a lack of citations. It can only provide responses based on available data, although vast, upon which it has been “trained.” There are no personal experiences or awareness - it can make probability judgments, but not forecast or predict the future. It is not a thinker. It is not sentient; it is not alive; it does not have feelings. You can always pull the plug. The question that will always exist - what is the truth? Along with what is our purpose and why are we here? It is the essential ontological question, ‘What is?’ that AI cannot answer.
Humans must always remain confident that they are rational beings and can think and have the ability to challenge the output of these AI Machina. Be careful of what you ask the machine. “Trust in AI requires multiple levels of reliability in the accuracy and safety of the machine, alignment of AI aims with human goals and in the accountability of the humans who govern the machine.” We must ask about how our world was created, is it the Machina that has the answer. What indeed is The Wonder of Terra (a book by Thomas W. Balderston), as in the Big Bang?
These machines will get better and better and provide information we can review and use, but will it be believable in every case. It is a new reality? Will it alter our reality? We may be helped in getting from A to B much faster, but then the next steps will still, will always, remain with us, we the people. We will always be confronted with who is the Alpha, the Omega, and many will never know, or refuse to know, even accept if they do, who that is. Certainly it is not a machine. It takes faith to fully comprehend.
Thomas W. Balderston
Author and Blogger
