{"id":7094,"date":"2023-03-09T06:01:55","date_gmt":"2023-03-09T12:01:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=7094"},"modified":"2023-05-04T16:58:46","modified_gmt":"2023-05-04T21:58:46","slug":"the-false-promise-of-chomskyism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=7094","title":{"rendered":"The False Promise of Chomskyism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Important Update (March 10):<\/mark><\/strong> On deeper reflection, I probably don’t need<\/em> to spend emotional energy refuting people like Chomsky, who believe that Large Language Models are just a laughable fad rather than a step-change in how humans can and will use technology, any more than I would’ve needed to spend it refuting those who said the same about the World Wide Web in 1993. Yes, they’re wrong, and yes, despite being wrong they’re self-certain, hostile, and smug, and yes I can see this, and yes it angers me. But the world is going to make the argument for me. And if not the world, Bing already does a perfectly serviceable job<\/a> at refuting Chomsky’s points (h\/t Sebastien Bubeck via Boaz Barak).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, out there in reality, last night’s South Park<\/em> episode<\/a> does a much<\/em> better job than most academic thinkpieces at exploring how ordinary people are going to respond (and have already responded) to the availability of ChatGPT. It will not<\/em>, to put it mildly, be with sneering Chomskyan disdain, whether the effects on the world are for good or ill or (most likely) both. Among other things—I don’t want to give away too much!—this episode prominently features a soothsayer accompanied by a bird that caws whenever it detects GPT-generated text. Now why didn’t I think of that in preference to cryptographic watermarking??<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another Update (March 11)<\/mark><\/strong>: To my astonishment and delight, even many of the anti<\/em>-LLM AI experts are refusing to defend Chomsky\u2019s attack-piece. That\u2019s the one important point about which I stand corrected!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another Update (March 12):<\/strong><\/mark> \u201cAs a Professor of Linguistics myself, I find it a little sad that someone who while young was a profound innovator in linguistics and more is now conservatively trying to block exciting new approaches.\u201c \u2014Christopher Manning<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

I was asked to respond to the New York Times<\/em> opinion piece entitled The False Promise of ChatGPT<\/a>, by Noam Chomsky along with Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull (who once took my class at MIT). I’ll be busy all day at the Harvard CS department, where I’m giving a quantum talk<\/a> this afternoon. [Added: Several commenters complained that they found this sentence “condescending,” but I’m not sure what exactly they wanted me to say—that I was visiting some school in Cambridge, MA, two T stops from the school where Chomsky works and I used to work?]<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But for now:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this piece Chomsky, the intellectual godfather god of an effort that failed for 60 years to build machines that can converse in ordinary language, condemns the effort that succeeded. [Added: Please, please<\/em> stop writing that I must be an ignoramus since I don’t even know that Chomsky has never worked on AI. I know perfectly well that he hasn’t, and meant only that he tends to be regarded as authoritative by<\/em> the “don’t-look-through-the-telescope” AI faction, the ones whose views he himself fully endorses in his attack-piece. If you don’t know the relevant history, read Norvig<\/a>.]<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chomsky condemns ChatGPT for four reasons:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. because it could, in principle, misinterpret sentences that could also be sentence fragments, like “John is too stubborn to talk to” (bizarrely, he never checks whether it does<\/em> misinterpret it—I just tried it this morning and it seems to decide correctly based on context whether it’s a sentence or a sentence fragment, much like I would!);<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. because it doesn\u2019t learn the way humans do (personally, I think ChatGPT and other large language models have massively<\/em> illuminated at least one component of the human language faculty, what you could call its predictive coding<\/a> component, though clearly not all of it);<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. because it could learn false facts or grammatical systems if fed false training data (how could it be otherwise?); and<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. most of all because it\u2019s \u201camoral,\u201d refusing to take a stand on potentially controversial issues (he gives an example involving the ethics of terraforming Mars).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    This last, of course, is a choice<\/em>, imposed by OpenAI using reinforcement learning. The reason for it is simply that ChatGPT is a consumer product. The same people who condemn it for not taking controversial stands would condemn it much more loudly if it did \u2014 just like the same people who condemn it for wrong answers and explanations, would condemn it equally for right ones (Chomsky promises as much in the essay).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I submit that, like the Jesuit astronomers declining to look through Galileo\u2019s telescope, what Chomsky and his followers are ultimately angry at is reality itself, for having the temerity to offer something up that they didn\u2019t predict and that doesn\u2019t fit their worldview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    [Note for people who might be visiting this blog for the first time:<\/em> I’m a CS professor at UT Austin, on leave for one year to work at OpenAI on the theoretical foundations of AI safety. I accepted OpenAI’s offer in part because I already held the views here, or something close to them; and given that I could see how large language models were poised to change the world for good and ill, I wanted to be part of the effort to help prevent their misuse. No one at OpenAI asked me to write this or saw it beforehand, and I don’t even know to what extent they agree with it.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Important Update (March 10): On deeper reflection, I probably don’t need to spend emotional energy refuting people like Chomsky, who believe that Large Language Models are just a laughable fad rather than a step-change in how humans can and will use technology, any more than I would’ve needed to spend it refuting those who said […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-metaphysical-spouting"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7094"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7094\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7283,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7094\/revisions\/7283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}