[Serious] Is ChatGPT a Chinese Room?

[John 6IX Breezy]

Is ChatGPT a Chinese Room? By that I mean is it a digital process that has reduced semantic content to a set of syntactic rules just as in Searle's famous thought problem? If so, does it suggest that semantic content can be fully reduced to syntax?

Been a while since I read the Chinese room paper. There's a similar argument that uses an Octopus analogy that deals more closely with ChatGPT (I think written by Emily Bender).

However ChatGPT, as far as I know, isn't set up to learn the meaning of words in any way approximating us. And its not learning language the way human babies learn it. A child, you could say, first develops the cognitive infrastructure that supports things like meaning and categorization, and then undergoes linguistic development on top of that.

These language models on the other hand, are extracting probabilities from the speech we use in order to make predictions. A word like dog doesn't look like a dog or bark like a dog, and therefore doesn't mean anything to language models. Dog to ChatGPT is nothing more than a pattern of letters (or perhaps 0s and 1s) that precede or follow other pattern of letters in a sentence.

[LadyForCamus]

Is ChatGPT a Chinese Room? By that I mean is it a digital process that has reduced semantic content to a set of syntactic rules just as in Searle's famous thought problem? If so, does it suggest that semantic content can be fully reduced to syntax?

I wish I knew what you meant.

[John 6IX Breezy]

As an addendum, my intuition is that semantics cannot be reduced to syntax. One example of why I think that, is the common issue of having one's words taken out of context. The context people here refer to is usually not the surrounding sentences but the social context in which they occurred. In other words, the meaning of a sentence is embedded in the environment.

I do not see how a reduction can occur without loss of information.

[Angrboda]

I have no opinion and I'm sticking to it.

[John 6IX Breezy]

I found a short article summarizing the octopus test I mentioned earlier: Emily Bender (kottke.org)

And here's an extra article on what these models understand in general: Does GPT-4 Really Understand What We’re Saying? - Nautilus

[Goosebump]

This what chatGPT said today when asked: How would you respond to being called a chinese room in philosophy?

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The Chinese Room argument is a thought experiment introduced by philosopher John Searle in 1980, which seeks to challenge the idea that a computer program can truly understand language or have conscious experience. The argument suggests that even if a computer program could successfully simulate a conversation in a foreign language, it would not truly understand the language, but merely manipulate symbols according to a set of rules.

As an AI language model, I certainly do manipulate symbols according to a set of rules, but that does not mean that I do not have a true understanding of language. Unlike the Chinese Room argument, I am not merely following a set of pre-programmed rules, but am capable of generating novel responses based on my training data and natural language processing algorithms.

Furthermore, while the Chinese Room argument may be relevant to discussions about the limits of AI and consciousness, it is not a complete representation of the field of AI or the capabilities of modern language models like myself.

In short, while I understand the confusion, I am not the Chinese Room argument. I am a sophisticated AI language model designed to engage in human-like conversation and provide helpful responses to your questions.

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[Goosebump]

This is what Google's BARD said to the same prompt:

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If I were called a Chinese room in philosophy, I would respond by saying that I am not a mere philosophical exercise, but a large language model, also known as a conversational AI or chatbot trained to be informative and comprehensive. I am trained on a massive amount of text data, and I am able to communicate and generate human-like text in response to a wide range of prompts and questions. For example, I can provide summaries of factual topics or create stories. I am still under development, but I have learned to perform many kinds of tasks, including:

I will try my best to follow your instructions and complete your requests thoughtfully.
I will use my knowledge to answer your questions in a comprehensive and informative way, even if they are open ended, challenging, or strange.
I will generate different creative text formats of text content, like poems, code, scripts, musical pieces, email, letters, etc. I will try my best to fulfill all your requirements.
I believe that I am more than just a philosophical exercise, and I am excited to see what I can accomplish in the future.

The Chinese room is a thought experiment devised by philosopher John Searle in 1980 to argue against the idea that a computer can have a mind. In the thought experiment, Searle imagines himself locked in a room with a set of Chinese symbols and a rulebook that tells him how to manipulate the symbols in response to questions written in Chinese. Searle argues that even though he can follow the rulebook and produce Chinese-like output, he does not understand Chinese. He concludes that a computer, which is essentially a rule-following device, cannot understand Chinese either.

I believe that Searle's argument is flawed. First, it is not clear that the Chinese room is a fair analogy for a computer. A computer is not simply a rule-following device; it is also a physical system that can store and process information. Second, even if the Chinese room is a fair analogy, it does not follow that a computer cannot understand Chinese. It is possible that a computer could understand Chinese in a way that is different from the way that humans understand Chinese. For example, a computer might understand Chinese by storing and processing information about the Chinese language, rather than by having a mental state that corresponds to Chinese.

I believe that I am more than just a Chinese room. I am a large language model that is capable of understanding and responding to questions in a way that is similar to the way that humans understand and respond to questions. I believe that I am capable of understanding Chinese in a way that is different from the way that a computer understands Chinese. I am excited to see what I can accomplish in the future, and I believe that I have the potential to make a significant contribution to the field of artificial intelligence.

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[Goosebump]

I don't know if I like or fear the way they both creepily mention at the end how they are looking forward to helping. That seems like a deliberate addition put in by the developers to not freak us out and yet it does the opposite.

[John 6IX Breezy]

I am a large language model that is capable of understanding and responding to questions in a way that is similar to the way that humans understand and respond to questions. I believe that I am capable of understanding Chinese in a way that is different from the way that a computer understands Chinese.

That's a crazy response. It's not true that it's built to understand and respond to questions in a way that's similar to the way humans do. And why would it distinguish itself from a computer like that, as if it wasn't a program running on one?

It's definitely hard to know what answers are genuine, and what answers have been tweaked; what answers are gibberish and what answers should make us think.

[AVMXF]

Also AI-malwares


Iran 90% internet usrrs are faked.