The Thomistic Institute Beyond Words: What ChatGPT Can't Say | Jane Sloan Peters
Dec 15, 2023
Jane Sloan Peters, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, discusses the limitations of ChatGPT in truly understanding human language, Thomas Aquinas' analysis of the word, the immateriality of the intellect, distinctions between AI chatbots and human speech, and the connection between verbal communication and experiencing God.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Kasparov's Defeat by Deep Blue
- Gary Kasparov lost to the computer Deep Blue in a historic 1997 chess match.
- His loss symbolized the "brain's last stand" against machine intelligence.
How ChatGPT Generates Language
- ChatGPT processes language by converting text into numerical tokens and predicting the next in sequence.
- It lacks true understanding and forms no concepts, operating instead on statistical relationships within large data.
Aquinas on Human Words and Concepts
- Aquinas teaches that human words signify interior concepts in the intellect, which come before spoken words.
- The spoken word has meaning only because it expresses an inner immaterial concept formed by the rational soul.