Episode 8.30: Thoughts and thinking in ChatGPT and you and me.

If the processes that go on in our neurological infrastructure are unintelligible, and I think there are a great many reasons to believe that they are, and if the same is true of what goes on in a neural net to beneath the surface of its output, then that again is another parallel between the way chatbots, or this particular chatbot chatGPT and human beings operate. That we cannot interrogate these inscrutable infrastructures to check up on them should make us more cautious about trusting their output m, just as we are cautious about trusting the output from human beings. But that chatGPT is no more considered to be infallible than you or me may in the end prove to be one of its most endearing characteristics, for if it were ever to be regarded as a universal oracle incapable of error, the world would be in much more danger than it is when we treat it as something that we have to take and scrutinise and challenge and question and analyse before we act too trustingly upon what it tells us. In that respect it mirrors human interactions.