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Gödel, Escher, Bach, and AI (2023)
A dazzlingly fast chatbot cannot replace the authentic and reflective voice of a thinking, living human being.
By now, you are most likely hyper-aware of the recent stunning progress in artificial intelligence due to the development of large language models such as ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Google’s Bard, and at least somewhat aware of the dangers posed by such systems’ frequent hallucinations and their predictable tone of supreme self-confidence and infallibility. Large language models, although they are astoundingly virtuosic and mind-bogglingly impressive in many ways, do not think up original ideas; rather, they glibly and slickly rehash words and phrases “ingested” by them in their training phase, which draws on untold millions of web sites, books, articles, etc. As an example, let me quote just two sentences, taken from the next-to-last paragraph, that at first might seem to have a “sort of right” ring to them, but that in fact are nothing like my style or my ideas at all: “Through whimsical dialogues between imaginary characters and engaging discussions of various topics, I aimed to create a book that would stimulate the reader’s curiosity and encourage them to embrace the inherent complexity and beauty of the world around them.
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