[ExI] Bender's Octopus (re: LLMs like ChatGPT)

[Giovanni Santostasi]

Very well put Stuart, I would argue that the true meaning is in the
relation between the words, that the words relating to something
external to language. This why one could completely understand a language
without ever having experienced an external referent. All that matters are
the relationships. As in the case of building mathematics from the nulls
set you could do that with any language. But most languages don't need even
to be built from scratch because they are already there. So for an alien or
ChatGPT (that is basically an alien) it is even simpler to derive an entire
universe of meaning only by studying patterns between already existing
words. This how NLM have derived grammar from these patterns and theory of
mind. I'm not sure why anybody would still insist on these capabilities of
NLM is not true understanding (one can argue on the level of understanding
but my experience is that for what concerns language comprehension NLM are
better than many humans).



On Fri, Mar 24, 2023 at 1:12 AM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> Quoting Gordon Swobe <gordon.swobe at gmail.com>:
>
> > Bender's point is not that ChatGBT is incapable of generating sensible
> > sentences about sticks and bears. It is that these LLMs don't know the
> > meanings of any words whatsoever. Confronted with a word it has never
> seen,
> > it must do a statistical analysis to try to find probable next words,
> never
> > knowing what any of them mean.
>
>
> You and Bender seem to making a big deal about the referential meaning
> of words as if they were some sacred goal-keepers of consciousness.
> But really the meaning of words are quite arbitrary and determined by
> the people who use them. Thus the referential meanings of words evolve
> and change over time and come to refer to different things. Take the
> word "terrific" for example. At one time, its referent was something
> terrible cognate to horrific referring to something horrible. These
> days however, its referent is something great or wonderful.
>
> Or how the meaning of liberal evolved in the U.S. from someone who
> acts like a free person in a free market to someone who wants big
> government, high taxes, and welfare programs. Or take for example when
> a kid on the street tells you, "Your drip is fresh." The meanings of
> words shift, change, and evolve over time and sometimes even define
> social groups. Consciousness is the ability to communicate despite the
> shifting arbitrary meaning of words, not because of the meaning of
> words having some true absolute referential meaning.
>
> Stuart LaForge
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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