It’s a very complicated version of the autofill text options above your iPhone keyboard.

I see a lot of people saying "it doesn't think" and while that's obviously true, I think it's important to expand on it a little. Not only is it the case that these models don't think in the classical sense of having sentience, they literally don't have any associations of meaning to the words. They don't put words together to express any semblance of meaning or some fact or anything like that. They are simply statistical engines that can link words together by their likelihood of appearing in some proximity of one another in their training data. It's not quite that simple because it doesn't see words the way we see words, it sees tokens which are transformed versions of the words that do carry some level of "meaning" but nowhere near the complexity of meaning in human speech. But there's a reason you can get Chat GPT to contradict itself very easily, the reason being that it doesn't assign meaning to what it was saying in the first place.

What is the use case for something like this? If it doesn’t know anything then surely it can’t be used to communicate anything to another person in any meaningful way? Education, fact-checking, journalism, narrative, that’s all out the door. What, is it only useful for generating better sounding scam emails? Easily creating SEO content? Making fake social media posts? That’s all online bullshit anyway.

Is Hallmark going to fire their writers and get AI to write their greeting cards? Put a few marketers out of business because suits don’t give a shit about well written copy? If those are the limits of the technology I’m thoroughly unimpressed.