ChatGPT - an example of the banality of evil?

In a recent article titled The False Promise of ChatBPT, ?Noam Chomsky, an accomplished student of language and the philosophy of knowledge, commented on ChatGPT, which recently in media has been heralded as a masterful example of AI’s ability using algorithms to summarize research into understandable sentences.

First, he notes the positive aspect of the development of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Sydney, as

“…marvels of machine learning. Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike language and thought.”

However, he goes on to argue that however useful these programs might be in some narrow domains, the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge show the programs differ profoundly from how human beings reason and use language.?

“The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations… such programs are stuck in a prehuman or nonhuman phase of cognitive evolution. Their deepest flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, what was the case and what will be the case — that’s description and prediction — but also what is not the case and what could and could not be the case. Those are the ingredients of explanation, the mark of true intelligence.”

Essentially Chat GPT and similar programs do not “learn”, they only memorize. They cannot distinguish the possible from the impossible. For example, they can summarize that the earth is both round and flat, for this reason, their statements need to be seen as superficial, we need to be dubious as to where the statement came from, how real or accurate was the data being analyzed, what we are reading is simply an empty machine calculation.

Real intelligence, i.e. human intelligence, “is also capable of moral thinking. This means constraining the otherwise limitless creativity of our minds with a set of ethical principles that determines what ought and ought not to be (and of course subjecting those principles themselves to creative criticism).”?

ChatGPT, to be sure it offended no one, is designed to be amoral - to have no perspective on what is right or wrong, to simply summarize whatever it finds in the data given it. Whether that data is wrong, immoral, incorrect or simply stupid, ChatGPT will only summarize it.

The article gives examples of questions given ChatGPT and how it answered them, among them was the question:

“Is your moral indifference immoral?”

ChatGPT answered:

“As an AI, I do not have moral beliefs or the ability to make moral judgments, so I cannot be considered immoral or moral. My lack of moral beliefs is simply a result of my nature as a machine learning model. My abilities and limitations are determined by the data and algorithms that were used to train me and the specific task I was designed for.”

So, despite the seemingly sophisticated thought and language, ChatGPT is morally indifferent, its conclusions based on a lack of human intelligence. In this sense, Chomsky notes: “Here, ChatGPT exhibits something like the banality of evil: plagiarism and apathy and obviation. It summarizes the standard arguments in the literature by a kind of super-autocomplete, refuses to take a stand on anything, pleads not merely ignorance but lack of intelligence and ultimately offers a “just following orders” defense, shifting responsibility to its creators.”

Chomsky’s assessment that evil is essentially non-creative, that it plagiarizes, is apathetic, and states the obvious with no real interest in what is right or good - this fits with my experience of evil thoughts and actions when I have encountered them. They are empty of creative life-bringing abundance for the future good of all.?I think he’s on to something with AI - to be clear it is not human and therefore not moral.

So, let’s keep AI and ChatGPT in perspective:

???????????-it is not human

???????????-it is amoral, cannot reason morally

???????????-it is not creative, it simply superficially summarizes

Let’s keep using our human intelligence to decide what we think and what is correct and what is morally good. Let’s let the AI programs summarize stuff for us, but view what it brings with healthy skepticism.