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?
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.