ChatGPT is just awesome

Put another way, human beings can be very susceptible to beautifully phrased nonsense.

Insert a politician joke here.

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Computer scientists and philosophers have pondered for years if itā€™s possible to create a conscious computer program. We may get programs that almost everyone thinks are intelligent and talks to as if theyā€™re intelligent, even though programmers can show thereā€™s nothing intelligent going on inside them. Itā€™s just complex pattern-matching.

And how do we know that ā€œcomplex pattern-matchingā€ is different from what humans do?

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You donā€™t need AI for that. You donā€™t even need RI (Real Intelligence).

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Iā€™ll believe in a conscious computer program when a computer can show appreciation and joy in beautify and profound sadness at injustice and evil without depending on an algorithm.

Thatā€™s nice. But it assumes intelligence [equals | implies | requires] consciousness. Which is by no means certain.

And I will again assert that until we understand how the brain works, we have no real basis to say what computers are doing is fundamentally different from what humans are doing. (We can say that computers are not very good at it,)

How do we know that brains are not using algorithms?

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I used it to compose an AppleScript, and a couple of Apex Classes (Apex is the Salesforce development language)ā€¦ while not perfect on its code (which would save OK - just the exact function was off a bit), it gave a place to start - a pattern as it were. Without having to write the entire thing. I can see this being helpful in this way. Of course, still need me to solution. Bu still an interesting and potentially helpful tool.

I was impressed with the Prose ability also. Again, a starting point. Helps with ideas, and let you develop the rest.

A test a colleague showed on LinkedIn of a z/OS Assembler ā€œHello Worldā€ program was hilariously bad. Likewise my test: Recursive Python Towers Of Hanoi.

Oh, and dont get me started with deepfakes. We will soon see a video of a famous politician eating a baby and it will be undistinguishable from reality.

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Does this mean that our brains are not running a very sophisticated and unfathomable algorithm? If thatā€™s the case, then what is the mind?

Edit: iā€™m in the camp that strong AI is not computable, but then again we do not really know what makes human intelligence so there we have it.

Without getting into epistemological discussions, I agree that some forms of intelligence do not require self-consciousness. My dog is intelligent (even sneaky) but does not have the self-awareness, ethical reasoning, meta-cognition, moral conscience, and imagining-conceptualization associated with self-consciousness. Iā€™m not a Cartesian, but Cogito, Ergo Sum would seem to apply here. :slightly_smiling_face:

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This isnā€™t the forum for this but you may be unnecessarily equating brain with mind. Though I believe there is a deep, at present unfathomable symbiotic relationship between mind and brain they are not one and the same. I think one can reasonably postulate that my dog has a brain but not a mind, which I define as necessarily having the attributes of ethical (for that matter philosophical) reasoning, moral conscience, appreciation for beauty, and more.

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The goal is not to stop judgement day but to survive it. :wink: :grin:

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But it seems increasingly likely that crows have at least some of that. They apparently ā€œknow what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds, a manifestation of higher intelligence and analytical thought long believed the sole province of humans and a few other higher mammals.ā€

See Sharon Begleyā€™s excellent article about this research here: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought primarily human - STAT

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Of course, I canā€™t speak for your dog, and as within humans, there are also big differences between different dogs, but my one has for sure a mind.
She is on an intelligence level of about a 3-4 year old child.
She remembers over a period of several years, could answer questions with yes and no, could count up to at least ten, could make decisions and distinguish very well between ā€œgoodā€ behavoir and ā€œbadā€ behavior, also within other persons.

And there are a lot of animals out there, who for certain have a mind, and not only a brain.
Besides the already mentioned ravens, there are scientific Investigations into apes, dolphins, whales, and a couple of other species with similar findings.

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@Ulli @tf2 my apologies for not being more precise. I typically avoid complex discussions in a forum of this nature as most of us are popping in and out. :slightly_smiling_face:

To vastly over simplify tremendously complex and not fully understood distinctions, what Iā€™m suggesting is that ā€œintelligenceā€ as reflected in AI is akin to the biological brainā€“pattern recognition, prediction, and much more.

By intelligence I meant mind in contrast to the mere brain. The latter is closer in concept to AI, mind is symbiotically connected and yet also distinct from the brain. The mind is characterized by moral and ethical judgements, conceptualization of principles and ideas, concept-to-language and language-to-concept generation along with oral, written, visual, and physical communication, the apprehension of beauty, abstract reasoning in developing original mathematical representations of physical reality, philosophy, music, humor, and more. I do not believe in a reductionism that reduces ā€œmindā€ to neurochemical impulses. The mind is much more than the sum of the brainā€™s neurochemical transactions. I was, wrongly, using ā€œintelligenceā€ as shorthand for mind. My apologies.

As to my dog, she too is very intelligent. She is capable of being sneaky because she possesses high animal intelligence, but she does not have a mind as Iā€™ve described it. :slightly_smiling_face:

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We are talking about different views on the world, and their ā€œdefinitionā€ of ā€œmindā€.
So it does not make a lot of sense to discus this here within MPU, if you are bringing in a more ā€œReligiousā€ point of view into a more technical world.
While you canā€™t prove your point of view, I could not prove it as completely wrong beyond a certain point, so we should not go into this direction with the discussion.
I would prefer, if we stay at the more technical and biochemical point of view as a kind of a common base.

We are indeed, one worldview tends to be too reductionist while often simultaneously veering into the metaphysical. The other can be far too simplistic not allowing science to speak in areas wherein lies its expertise, hence the infamous Galileo episode. Iā€™d say science stays within its very helpful but limited sphereā€”the physical since it cannot, by its nature and presuppositions address the metaphysical while not denying the existence of the metaphysical on scientific grounds, which of course, would be a contradiction.

But enough of thisā€¦back to task managers and notes apps. :grin:

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I gave ChatGPT multiple tries to answer this question right. Big oof. Is there any helmet more iconic than Michiganā€™s?

[Yes, I know itā€™s just analyzing text and doesnā€™t have any ā€œrealā€ knowledge. I just found this funny.]

Back to the topic, ChatGPT is pretty awesome.

We can (and have) argue about whether or not AI is intelligent. If I just take the idea that AI is what it is, then itā€™s getting pretty awesome.
That text about Michiganā€™s helmet that was just posted read really well, and could have been written by me or someone else who didnā€™t really know what they are talking about (Iā€™d never seen their helmet before today, so I would have not had details about the colours).

For me, the point of interest right now is that this current kind of AI is able to produce results that closely resemble what a human might produce (not an expert human so far, but humans often write nonsense too). I think thatā€™s awesome in the literal, not entirely positive, sense of the word.

Thereā€™s no way that I could answer that question either :laughing:

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