Last year, when Blake Lemoine was fired by Google for claiming his AI was sentient, a lot of people on this website sensibly noted that the danger of these chatbots was not that they were sentient, but that average people could easily be tricked into thinking that they were.
And now here we are: it seems we tech people are every bit as susceptible to this kind of thinking as the average joes we looked down on.
Actually look at this “language” that GPT-4 has written: it’s just a mishmash of features from the most commonly blogged-about existing programming languages. It has no conceptual insights, no original ideas, no taste that isn’t cribbed from one of the few languages it’s copying from.
There are cases where getting a short distillation of the mean opinion of The Internet is useful. But designing a new programming language is clearly not one of them, mostly because the chatbot is not “designing” a language—it is guessing the most likely response to a question about programming languages.
And now here we are: it seems we tech people are every bit as susceptible to this kind of thinking as the average joes we looked down on.
Actually look at this “language” that GPT-4 has written: it’s just a mishmash of features from the most commonly blogged-about existing programming languages. It has no conceptual insights, no original ideas, no taste that isn’t cribbed from one of the few languages it’s copying from.
There are cases where getting a short distillation of the mean opinion of The Internet is useful. But designing a new programming language is clearly not one of them, mostly because the chatbot is not “designing” a language—it is guessing the most likely response to a question about programming languages.