Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)A thought experiment in the National Library of Thailand—or why #ChatGPT (or any other language model) isn't actually understanding.
Aaron D'Souza@emilymbender An interesting test is whether any of these systems would be able to *initiate* a conversation (absent any other input). How could they, when they have no idea what it means to say "hello"?
This is where "distributional semantics" fails us. Even if the protagonist in the library mastered the distributional semantics of the Thai linguistic form, they would only be able to initiate a conversation by spitting out non-sequiturs that satisfied some marginal probability requirements.