World-renowned intellectual and linguist Noam Chomsky has issued a scathing indictment of ChatGPT, which has been all the rage over the past few months, both inside and outside the technology sector.
The much-talked-about ChatGPT is an OpenAI language chatbot that can compose essays, write code, and perform other things based on user enquiries.
However, leftist intellectual juggernaut and linguist Noam Chomsky is less than impressed by the popular technological tool.
In a scathing opinion piece in the New York Times titled “Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT”, Chomsky collaborated with linguistics professor Ian Roberts and director of artificial intelligence at a tech company Jeffrey Watumull.
“OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Microsoft’s Sydney are marvels of machine learning,” the three men wrote in the op-ed.
According to the opinion piece, these programmes have been welcomed as the first glimmers of artificial general intelligence on the horizon.
The trio described this as seeming to be the long-awaited time when mechanical minds outperform human brains, not just in terms of processing speed and memory size, but also in terms of intellectual insight, creative inventiveness, and every other uniquely human attribute.
“That day may come, but its dawn is not yet breaking, contrary to what can be read in hyperbolic headlines and reckoned by injudicious investments,” they wrote.
They added that “ChatGPT exhibits something like the banality of evil: plagiarism and apathy and obviation”.
Hannah Arendt, a political theorist and philosopher, invented the term “banality of evil” after attending the trial of Holocaust architect and prominent Nazi Adolf Eichmann in 1961.
Arendt proposed that evil deeds were not always committed by evil individuals, but might instead be the consequence of a bureaucrat obediently carrying out orders.
“Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought, for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil,” wrote Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
But what does this concept and its history have to do with AI?
“Given the amorality (having or showing no concern about whether behaviour is morally right or wrong), faux science, and linguistic incompetence of these systems, we can only laugh or cry at their popularity,” wrote the trio for the NYT.
They asserted that today’s seemingly revolutionary advances in artificial intelligence are grounds for both concern and optimism. Optimism stems from the fact that intellect is the mechanism by which we overcome challenges.
“Concern because we fear that the most popular and fashionable strain of AI – machine learning – will degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge.”
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