The "intelligence" of Artificial Intelligence is not human intelligence.

2023-11-22

The emergence of artificial intelligence has elicited different reactions from technology leaders, politicians, and the general public. Some people enthusiastically praise AI technologies like ChatGPT as beneficial tools with the potential to transform society, while others are wary of any tool labeled with the term "intelligence" that could surpass human capabilities. Anthony Chemero, a philosophy and psychology professor at the University of Cincinnati, claims that our understanding of AI has been muddled by linguistics: although AI does possess intelligence, it cannot have intelligence in the same way humans do, even if "it can lie and talk nonsense like its creators." According to the vocabulary we use in our daily lives, AI is undoubtedly intelligent, but intelligent computers have existed for many years, as Chemero explains in a paper he co-authored published in the journal "Nature Human Behaviour." Firstly, the paper points out that ChatGPT and other AI systems are large-scale language models (LLMs) trained on a vast amount of data mined from the internet, which often contains biases from the data contributors. "LLMs can generate impressive text, but they often fabricate facts out of thin air," he says. "They learn to generate grammatically correct sentences, but they don't actually know what they mean," he adds. "LLMs differ from human cognition because they lack concrete entities." The creators of LLMs refer to their fabrication as "hallucinations," although Chemero says a better term would be "gibberish," as LLMs simply construct sentences by continuously adding the most probable next word without knowing or caring whether what they say is true. Furthermore, he says that with just a little guidance, people can make an AI tool utter "racist, sexist, and other biased and malicious remarks." The intention of Chemero's paper is to emphasize that LLMs do not possess intelligence like humans do because humans are entities surrounded by other humans, as well as material and cultural environments. "This makes us care about our own existence and the world we live in," he points out. LLMs do not truly exist in the world and do not care about anything. LLMs do not possess intelligence like humans do because they simply "don't care," says Chemero. "Things matter to us. We strive to improve our living environment. We care about the world we live in."