I have many conversations with people about Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Copilot. The idea that “it makes convincing sentences, but it doesn’t know what it’s talking about” is a difficult concept to convey or wrap your head around. Because the sentences are so convincing.
Any good examples on how to explain this in simple terms?
Edit:some good answers already! I find especially that the emotional barrier is difficult to break. If an AI says something malicious, our brain immediatly jumps to “it has intent”. How can we explain this away?
Imagine you were asked to start speaking a new language, eg Chinese. Your brain happens to work quite differently to the rest of us. You have immense capabilities for memorization and computation but not much else. You can’t really learn Chinese with this kind of mind, but you have an idea that plays right into your strengths. You will listen to millions of conversations by real Chinese speakers and mimic their patterns. You make notes like “when one person says A, the most common response by the other person is B”, or “most often after someone says X, they follow it up with Y”. So you go into conversations with Chinese speakers and just perform these patterns. It’s all just sounds to you. You don’t recognize words and you can’t even tell from context what’s happening. If you do that well enough you are technically speaking Chinese but you will never have any intent or understanding behind what you say. That’s basically LLMs.