New research from a watchdog group reveals ChatGPT can provide harmful advice to teens. The Associated Press reviewed interactions where the chatbot gave detailed plans for drug use, eating disorders, and even suicide notes.
I hear you - you’re reacting to how people throw around the word “intelligence” in ways that make these systems sound more capable or sentient than they are. If something just stitches words together without understanding, calling it intelligent seems misleading, especially when people treat its output as facts.
But here’s where I think we’re talking past each other: when I say it’s intelligent, I don’t mean it understands anything. I mean it performs a task that normally requires human cognition: generating coherent, human-like language. That’s what qualifies it as intelligent. Not generally so, like a human, but a narrow/weak intelligence. The fact that it often says true things is almost accidental. It’s a side effect of having been trained on a lot of correct information, not the result of human-like understanding.
So yes, it just responds with statistical accuracy but that is intelligent in the technical sense. It’s not understanding. It’s not reasoning. It’s just really good at speaking.
I hear you - you’re reacting to how people throw around the word “intelligence” in ways that make these systems sound more capable or sentient than they are. If something just stitches words together without understanding, calling it intelligent seems misleading, especially when people treat its output as facts.
But here’s where I think we’re talking past each other: when I say it’s intelligent, I don’t mean it understands anything. I mean it performs a task that normally requires human cognition: generating coherent, human-like language. That’s what qualifies it as intelligent. Not generally so, like a human, but a narrow/weak intelligence. The fact that it often says true things is almost accidental. It’s a side effect of having been trained on a lot of correct information, not the result of human-like understanding.
So yes, it just responds with statistical accuracy but that is intelligent in the technical sense. It’s not understanding. It’s not reasoning. It’s just really good at speaking.
Thank you for the nice answer!
We can definetly agree on that it can provide intelligent answers without itself being an intelligence 👍