I have many conversations with people about Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Copilot. The idea that “it makes convincing sentences, but it doesn’t know what it’s talking about” is a difficult concept to convey or wrap your head around. Because the sentences are so convincing.

Any good examples on how to explain this in simple terms?

Edit:some good answers already! I find especially that the emotional barrier is difficult to break. If an AI says something malicious, our brain immediatly jumps to “it has intent”. How can we explain this away?

  • @Rolando
    4•8 months ago

    This is what I was going to point to. When I was in grad school, it was often referred to as the Symbol Gounding Problem. Basically it’s a interdisciplinary research problem involving pragmatics, embodied cognition, and a bunch of others. The LLM people are now crashing into this research problem, and it’s interesting to see how they react.