COMMENTARY / WORLD

ChatGPT sounds exactly like us. How is that

a good thing?
Artificial intelligence is arguably gaining in the human imitation game

For 70 years, programmers have tried to make computers more like people. Now they’ve succeeded — sort of.  | REUTERS

BY STEPHEN MIHM Feb 1, 2023

BLOOMBERG

In 1950, Alan Turing, the British computer scientist who cracked the Enigma code
during World War II, wrote an article in which he posed a seemingly absurd question:
“Can machines think?”
The debut late last year of the eerily lifelike ChatGPT appeared to move us closer to an
answer. Overnight, a fully formed silicon-based chatbot stepped from the digital
shadows. It can craft jokes, write ad copy, debug computer code and converse about
anything and everything. This unsettling new reality is already being described as one of
those “tipping points” in the history of artificial intelligence.

But it’s been a long time coming. And this particular creation has been gestating in
computer science labs for decades.

As a test of his proposition for a thinking machine, Turing described an “imitation

game,” where a human being would interrogate two respondents located in another
room. One would be a flesh-and-blood human being, the other a computer. The
interrogator would be tasked with figuring out which was which by posing questions via
a “teleprinter.”

Turing imagined an intelligent computer answering questions with sufficient ease that
the interrogator would fail to distinguish between man and machine. While he
conceded that his generation’s computers couldn’t come close to passing the test, he
predicted that by century’s end, “one will be able to speak of machines thinking without
expecting to be contradicted.”

His essay helped launch research into artificial intelligence. But it also sparked a long-
running philosophical debate, as Turing’s argument effectively sidelined the importance
of human consciousness. If a machine could only parrot the appearance of thinking —
but not have any awareness of doing so — was it really a thinking machine?

For many years, the practical challenge of building a machine that could play the
imitation game overshadowed these deeper questions. The key obstacle was human
language, which, unlike the calculation of elaborate mathematical problems, proved
remarkably resistant to the application of computing power.

This wasn’t for a lack of trying. Harry Huskey, who worked with Turing, returned home
to the U.S. to build what the New York Times breathlessly billed as an “electric brain”
capable of translating languages. This project, which the federal government helped
fund, was driven by Cold War imperatives that made Russian-to-English translation a
priority.

The idea that words could be translated in a one-to-one fashion — much like code-
breaking — quickly ran headlong into the complexities of syntax, never mind the
ambiguities inherent in individual words. Did “fire” refer to flames? End of
employment? The trigger of a gun?

Warren Weaver, one of the Americans behind these early efforts, recognized that context
was key. If “fire” appeared near “gun,” one could draw certain conclusions. Weaver
called these sorts of correlations the “statistical semantic character of language,” an
insight that would have significant implications in the coming decades.

The achievements of this first generation are underwhelming by today’s standards. The
translation researchers found themselves stymied by the variability of language and by
1966, a government-sponsored report concluded that machine translation was a dead
end. Funding dried up for years.
But others carried on research in what became known as Natural Language Processing,
or NLP. These early efforts sought to demonstrate that a computer, given enough rules to
guide its responses, could at least take a stab at playing the imitation game.

Typical of these efforts was a program a group of researchers unveiled in 1961. Dubbed
“Baseball,” the program billed itself as a “first step” in enabling users to “ask questions of
the computer in ordinary English and to have the computer answer questions directly.”
But there was a catch: users could only ask questions about baseball stored in the
computer.

This chatbot was soon overshadowed by other creations born in the Jurassic era of
digital technology: SIR (Semantic Information Retrieval), which debuted in 1964; ELIZA,
which responded to statements with questions in the manner of a caring therapist; and
SHRDLU, which permitted a user to instruct the computer to move shapes using
ordinary language.

Though crude, many of these early experiments helped drive innovations in how
humans and computers might interact — how, for example, a computer could be
programmed to “listen” to a query, turn it around, and answer in a way that sounded
credible and lifelike, all while reusing the words and ideas posed in the original query.

Others sought to train computers to generate original works of poetry and prose with a
mixture of rules and words generated at random. In the 1980s, for example, two
programmers published The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed, which was
presented as the first book written entirely by a computer.

But these demonstrations obscured a more profound revolution brewing in the world of
NLP. As computational power increased at an exponential rate and a growing body of
works became available in machine-readable format, it became possible to build
increasingly sophisticated models that quantified the probability of correlations
between words.

This phase, which one account aptly described as “massive data bashing,” took flight
with the advent of the internet, which offered an ever-growing corpus of texts that could
be used to derive “soft,” probabilistic guidelines that enable a computer to grasp the
nuances of language. Instead of hard and fast “rules” that sought to anticipate every
linguistic permutation, the new statistical approach adopted a more flexible approach
that was, more often than not, correct.

The proliferation of commercial chatbots grew out of this research, as did other
applications: basic language recognition, translation software, ubiquitous auto-correct
features and other now commonplace features of our increasingly wired lives. But as
anyone who has yelled at an artificial airline agent knows, these definitely had their
limits.

In the end, it turned out that the only way for a machine to play the imitation game was
to mimic the human brain, with its billions of interconnected neurons and synapses. So-
called artificial neural networks operate much the same way, sifting data and drawing
increasingly strong connections over time via a feedback process.

The key to doing so is another distinctly human tactic: practice, practice, practice. If you
train a neural network by having it read books, it can begin to craft sentences that mimic
the language in those books. And if you have the neural network read, say, everything
ever written, it can get really, really good at communicating.

Which is, more or less, what lies at the heart of ChatGPT. The platform has been trained
on a vast corpus of written work. Indeed, the entirety of Wikipedia represents less than
1% of the texts it has hoovered up in its quest to mimic human speech.

Thanks to this training, ChatGPT can arguably triumph in the imitation game. But
something rather curious has happened along the way. By Turing’s standards, machines
can now think. But the only way they have been able to pull off this feat is to become less
like machines with rigid rules and more like humans.

It’s something worth considering amidst all the angst occasioned by ChatGPT. Imitation
is the sincerest form of flattery. But is it the machines we need to fear or ourselves?

Stephen Mihm, a professor of history at the University of Georgia, is coauthor of

“Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance.”

KEYWORDS

COMPUTERS (HTTPS://WWW.JAPANTIMES.CO.JP/TAG/COMPUTERS/), AI
(HTTPS://WWW.JAPANTIMES.CO.JP/TAG/AI/), CHATBOTS
(HTTPS://WWW.JAPANTIMES.CO.JP/TAG/CHATBOTS/), TECH 
(HTTPS://WWW.JAPANTIMES.CO.JP/TAG/TECH/), CHATGPT
(HTTPS://WWW.JAPANTIMES.CO.JP/TAG/CHATGPT/)

(htt // d

In a time of both misinformation and too much information,

quality journalism is more crucial than ever.
By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

(/subscribe/?
SUBSCRIBE
utm_source=jto&utm_medium=general-
NOW
box&utm_campaign=sub)