Understanding is not an act but a Labor
Pontydysgu EU,
Apr 12, 2023
This is in essence another a priori argument telling us what AI cannot do from Shannon Vallor: "Understanding is beyond GPT-3's reach... It's a sustained project that we carry out daily, as we build, repair and strengthen the ever-shifting bonds of sense that anchor us to the others, things, times and places, that constitute a world." This is, as Alberto Romero says, a much better framing than typical "AI models can't understand because they don't have a world model" or "because they can't access the meaning behind the form of the words." And while understanding is a labour (we could have a long discussion about that), it is nothing that is in principle beyond the reach of an AI. Out of the box GPT-3 had no memory of previous interactions, though modifications already exist that give it one. And its lack of memory is a design feature (called few shot learning), not a limitation, enabling what is essentially a 'snapshot' of a long training history to be applied as a pre-defined algorithm. Vallor's argument is like saying 'this book cannot learn' - true, but irrelevant, given what produced it.
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