Comment Seeing through the Emperor's clothes. (Score 1) 62
Chat GPT and its rivals are the latest incarnations of 50 to 60 year old programs like ELIZA (1962-4) and PARRY (1972). Then in the 1990s Andrew C. Bulhak's Postmodernism Generator using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text from recursive grammars. and Jason Hutchens' MegaHAL which used, in part hidden, Markov models to produce often lucid text and, of course, others.
Chat GPT has the advantage of a huge corpus of text in its training data, tools for decoding natural language & (probably) more computing power than the entire world had in the 1970s.
While journalists keep saying that Chat GPT is artificial intelligence, the reality is it is a clever implementation of an LLM. Provided the answer to a question is well represented in its training data, it has a good chance of producing a factual, preferably useful, answer. Ask for something that it limited representation of in its training data & it can "hallucinate". Ask for an artistic response (poetry, screenplays, etc) and it will oblige, but the answers seem somehow flat.
When I first started exploring Chat GPT, I set it a number of tasks: Writing a short stand-up comedy set on a given topic, writing poems in given styles on given topics, rewriting the end of Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliette and Hamlet to have happy endings, given the first half of the script for first scene of my satirical fantasy play The Grin Reaper: The Bunny's Tale complete the scene. In each case it produced something compliant but the "comedy" was dead flat, the poetry lacked emotion &, as for the Shakespeare, nah!
Does this mean that AI can't compete in the arts? No, it means that 2023 LLMs can't but the technology is improving and if the creators of them see a business advantage to improving them in that direction, we can expect something a lot better