{"id":16490,"date":"2023-09-24T15:20:43","date_gmt":"2023-09-24T13:20:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesmartcityjournal.cibeles.net\/sin-categoria\/a-linguistic-anthropologist-explains-how-humans-are-like-chatgpt\/"},"modified":"2025-02-20T12:17:58","modified_gmt":"2025-02-20T11:17:58","slug":"a-linguistic-anthropologist-explains-how-humans-are-like-chatgpt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thesmartcityjournal.com\/en\/artificial-intelligence\/a-linguistic-anthropologist-explains-how-humans-are-like-chatgpt","title":{"rendered":"A linguistic anthropologist explains how humans are like ChatGPT"},"content":{"rendered":"

The boundary between humans and machines, in terms of the way we interact with one another, is fuzzier than most people would care to admit<\/p>\n

ChatGPT is a hot topic at my university, where faculty members are deeply concerned about academic integrity, while administrators urge us to \u201cembrace the benefits\u201d of this \u201cnew frontier.\u201d<\/a> It\u2019s a classic example of what my colleague Punya Mishra<\/a> calls the \u201cdoom-hype cycle\u201d around new technologies. Likewise, media coverage of human-AI interaction \u2014 whether paranoid or starry-eyed \u2014 tends to emphasise its newness.<\/p>\n

In one sense, it is undeniably new. Interactions with ChatGPT can feel unprecedented, as when a tech<\/a> journalist couldn\u2019t get a chatbot to stop declaring its love for him<\/a>. In my view, however, the boundary between humans and machines, in terms of the way we interact with one another, is fuzzier than most people would care to admit, and this fuzziness accounts for a good deal of the discourse swirling around ChatGPT.<\/p>\n

When I\u2019m asked to check a box to confirm I\u2019m not a robot, I don\u2019t give it a second thought \u2013 of course I\u2019m not a robot. On the other hand, when my email client suggests a word or phrase to complete my sentence, or when my phone guesses the next word I\u2019m about to text, I start to doubt myself. Is that what I meant to say? Would it have occurred to me if the application hadn\u2019t suggested it? Am I part robot? These large language models have been trained on massive amounts of \u201cnatural\u201d human language. Does this make the robots part human?<\/p>\n

AI<\/a> chatbots are new, but public debates over language change are not. As a linguistic anthropologist<\/a>, I find human reactions to ChatGPT the most interesting thing about it. Looking carefully at such reactions reveals the beliefs about language underlying people\u2019s ambivalent, uneasy, still-evolving relationship with AI interlocutors.<\/p>\n

ChatGPT and the like hold up a mirror to human language. Humans are both highly original and unoriginal when it comes to language. Chatbots reflect this, revealing tendencies and patterns that are already present in interactions with other humans.<\/p>\n

Creators or mimics?<\/h2>\n

Recently, famed linguist Noam Chomsky and his colleagues argued that chatbots are \u201cstuck in a prehuman or nonhuman phase of cognitive evolution<\/a>\u201d because they can only describe and predict, not explain. Rather than drawing on an infinite capacity to generate new phrases, they compensate with huge amounts of input, which allows them to make predictions about which words to use with a high degree of accuracy.<\/p>\n

This is in line with Chomsky\u2019s historic recognition<\/a> that human language could not be produced merely through children\u2019s imitation of adult speakers. The human language faculty had to be generative, since children do not receive enough input to account for all the forms they produce, many of which they could not have heard before. That is the only way to explain why humans \u2013 unlike other animals with sophisticated systems of communication \u2013 have a theoretically infinite capacity to generate new phrases.<\/p>\n

Noam Chomsky developed the generative theory of language acquisition.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a problem with that argument, though. Even though humans are endlessly capable of generating new strings of language, people usually don\u2019t. Humans are constantly recycling bits of language they\u2019ve encountered before and shaping their speech in ways that respond \u2013 consciously or unconsciously \u2013 to the speech of others, present or absent.<\/p>\n

As Mikhail Bakhtin<\/a> \u2013 a Chomsky-like figure for linguistic anthropologists \u2013 put it, \u201cour thought itself,\u201d along with our language, \u201cis born and shaped in the process of interaction<\/a> and struggle with others\u2019 thought.\u201d Our words \u201ctaste\u201d of the contexts where we and others have encountered them before, so we\u2019re constantly wrestling to make them our own.<\/p>\n

Even plagiarism is less straightforward than it appears. The concept of stealing someone else\u2019s words assumes<\/a> that communication always takes place between people who independently come up with their own original ideas and phrases. People may like to think of themselves that way, but the reality shows otherwise in nearly every interaction \u2013 when I parrot a saying of my dad\u2019s to my daughter; when the president gives a speech that someone else crafted, expressing the views of an outside interest group; or when a therapist interacts with her client according to principles that her teachers taught her to heed.<\/p>\n

In any given interaction, the framework for production \u2013 speaking or writing \u2013 and reception \u2013 listening or reading and understanding \u2013 varies in terms of<\/a> what is said, how it is said, who says it and who is responsible in each case.<\/p>\n

What AI reveals about humans<\/h2>\n

The popular conception of human language views communication primarily as something that takes place between people who invent new phrases from scratch. However, that assumption breaks down when Woebot, an AI therapy app<\/a>, is trained to interact with human clients by human therapists, using conversations from human-to-human therapy sessions. It breaks down when one of my favorite songwriters, Colin Meloy of The Decemberists<\/a>, tells ChatGPT<\/a> to write lyrics and chords in his own style. Meloy found the resulting song \u201cremarkably mediocre\u201d and lacking in intuition, but also uncannily in the zone of a Decemberists song.<\/p>\n

As Meloy notes, however, the chord progressions, themes and rhymes in human-written pop songs also tend to mirror other pop songs, just as politicians\u2019 speeches draw freely<\/a> from past generations of politicians and activists, which were already replete with phrases from the Bible. Pop songs and political speeches are especially vivid illustrations of a more general phenomenon. When anyone speaks or writes, how much is newly generated \u00e0 la Chomsky? How much is recycled \u00e0 la Bakhtin? Are we part robot? Are the robots part human?<\/p>\n

People like Chomsky who say that chatbots are unlike human speakers are right. However, so are those like Bakhtin who point out that we\u2019re never really in control of our words \u2013 at least, not as much as we\u2019d imagine ourselves to be. In that sense, ChatGPT forces us to consider an age-old question anew: How much of our language is really ours?<\/p>\n

Brendan H. O\u2019Connor<\/em><\/a>, Associate Professor, School of Transborder Studies, <\/em>Arizona State University<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

This article is republished from <\/em>The Conversation<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read the <\/em>original article<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The boundary between humans and machines, in terms of the way we interact with one another, is fuzzier than most people would care to admit ChatGPT is a hot topic at my university, where faculty members are deeply concerned about academic integrity, while administrators urge us to \u201cembrace the benefits\u201d of this \u201cnew frontier.\u201d It\u2019s a classic\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16489,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_scj_primary_category_id":55,"_scj_featured":true,"_scj_featured_from":"","_scj_featured_until":"","_scj_featured_order":426,"_scj_visibility_class":"current","_scj_layout_family":"standard","_scj_article_style":"","_scj_display_overrides":[],"_scj_intro_image_id":16489,"_scj_intro_alt":"A linguistic anthropologist explains how humans are like ChatGPT","_scj_intro_caption":"","_scj_intro_class":"","_scj_intro_float":"","_scj_full_image_id":16489,"_scj_full_alt":"A linguistic anthropologist explains how humans are like ChatGPT","_scj_full_caption":"","_scj_full_class":"","_scj_full_float":"","_scj_media_type":"","_scj_media_provider":"","_scj_media_external_id":"","_scj_media_url":"","_scj_media_poster_id":0,"_scj_media_width":0,"_scj_media_height":0,"_scj_media_aspect_ratio":"","_scj_media_description":"","_scj_gallery_items":[],"_scj_related_post_ids":[],"_scj_additional_authors":[],"scj_layout_family":"standard","scj_media_provider":"","scj_media_url":"","scj_full_caption":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence"],"yoast_head":"\nA linguistic anthropologist explains how humans are like ChatGPT - thesmartcityjournal.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"ChatGPT is a hot topic at my university, where faculty members are deeply concerned about academic integrity, while\u00a0administrators urge us to \u201cembrace the benefits\u201d of this \u201cnew frontier.\u201d\u00a0It\u2019s a classic example of what my colleague\u00a0Punya Mishra\u00a0calls the \u201cdoom-hype cycle\u201d around new technologies. 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