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?
It’s all just fancy statistics. It turns words into numbers. Then it finds patterns in those numbers. When you enter a prompt, it finds numbers that are similar and spits out an answer.
You can get into vectors and back propagation and blah blah blah but essentially it’s a math formula. We call it AI but it’s not fundamentally different than solving 2x + 4 = 10 for x.
x = 3