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Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her) @emilymbender@dair-community.social
We're going to need journalists to stop talking about synthetic text extruding machines as if they have thoughts or stances that they are trying to communicate. ChatGPT can't admit anything, nor self-report. Gah.
And personification of natural phenomena is also a problem. It undercuts the fundamental causes of things when we shortcut that by saying a thing or force "wants" to do something, especially while teaching. It can be useful at a very basic level (like, kindergarten/children's television), but only to a point. After that it is misleading and inefficient for actual education.
Same goes here. When we're discussing the problems of people treating algorithms as thinking, acting beings, referring to the output as a "choice" or "claim" is the very last thing we should do, let alone using it as evidence of anything. There is no memory there - it's fabricating a response based on the input, and the input directs the response. If I input a question like, "Why did you eat my pizza?", it would output text fitting the context of my question, probably something akin to "Because pizza is delicious" or something. That doesn't prove it at my pizza, it just shows the malleability of the algorithm.