Is #ChatGPT just a lavishly funded and marketed version of the Alan Sokal -inspired 1990s and 2000s joke "paper generators" eg #PostmodernismGenerator , #SciGen, #MathGen etc? 🙄

@bibliotecaria #GPT systems don't really know anything, they just generate text that is statistically likely to occur according to the rules inferred from the huge volumes of text with which they were trained. Think of it as a stochastic parrot that utters something that sounds like it might be true, but the parrot doesn't know what it is saying, and it also doesn't really understand you.
But it is not really a parrot. It is more like a giant cloud of all the words in all the language with which it has been created, and an enormous number of threads connecting the words to one another, telling the machine how likely a certain word is to occur after all the other words it has strung together so far. It is quite remarkable that such a simple (even though insanely huge) language model can create any texts that seem to mean anything at all. Any GPT is basically a Chinese Room (google that if you don't know what that is), it is a system of rules about how to create output text from an input text.

There used to be a very simple bot at elsewhere.org that generated texts that looked like honest philosophical essays with footnotes and citations and everything, but it was just a kind of compiler for natural language, creating random text from a simple generative grammar, yet people in academia were fooled into thinking those texts were real and meaningful. It was called Postmodernism Generator. I miss that thing, I wish it were still available online. It was fun.

#chatgpt #chatgpt3 #gpt3 #postmodernismgenerator