ChatGPT, the smart echo machine

I'm sure that, just like me, you recently have been exposed to posts about ChatGPT. Most of them go as follows: "I asked ChatGPT about X, and look at how smart, correct and to the point the response is. This is disruptive!". That response typically is a reasonably well written and moderately coherent echo of content and thoughts that are widely spread online.

But an echo, no matter how sophisticated, does not add anything new.

Sometimes these posts come from people whose jobs include text content creation such as marketeers and copywriters. And the next thought often is "this will profoundly change the nature of my job!". Which immediately makes me think: do you hold your job in such a low esteem? Don't you think that you can do better than that? Isn't your ambition to come up with unique and valuable new input, something no one ever came up with before?

It gets even more amusing when people ask ChatGPT about the prospects of itself or AI in general. You invariably get the echos of all the hypes people have published. That does not seem to prevent people from attaching some kind of distinct value to the fact that ChatGPT is reproducing them.

It reminds me a bit of how people were impressed by 19th-century automata.

To be clear, I do think that ChatGPT is indeed a hugely impressive engineering accomplishment. It's amazing what text extrapolation, deeply trained on a huge body of existing copy, aiming to be indistinguishable from human-produced text, can do. And no doubt it will have many good and bad usages. Future will tell about the balance, but one source of concern is: what if published content is increasingly created by tools like ChatGPT, and that content is used to train the next generation tools? Increasingly distorted echos of echos.

But most people seem to miss what to me is the most interesting and thought-provoking aspect. By showing us what can be achieved by a mechanistic approach like deeply trained text extrapolation, we are forced to rethink what is real intelligence and creativity consists of. It turns out that some stuff of which we thought it demanded intelligence and creativity, such as writing a mundane piece of text or poem, does not. In that way, tools like ChatGPT are holding us an inconvenient, but very interesting mirror. That mirror helps us refine our thinking about the true distinguishing aspects of our human intelligence.