Pope Francis has died

The Vatican published an interesting document on AI [1], which attributes a number of quotes to Pope Francis:

* As Pope Francis noted, the machine “makes a technical choice among several possibilities based either on well-defined criteria or on statistical inferences. Human beings, however, not only choose, but in their hearts are capable of deciding."

* In light of this, the use of AI, as Pope Francis said, must be “accompanied by an ethic inspired by a vision of the common good, an ethic of freedom, responsibility, and fraternity, capable of fostering the full development of people in relation to others and to the whole of creation.”

* As Pope Francis observes, “in this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity.”

* As Pope Francis observes, “the very use of the word ‘intelligence’” in connection with AI “can prove misleading”

[1] https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...

> * As Pope Francis observes, “the very use of the word ‘intelligence’” in connection with AI “can prove misleading”

Yes, LLMs are more about knowledge than intelligence. AK rather than AI.

Noam Chomsky just called it "plagiarism software."

Pretty disappointing from someone who spent his career modelling language and the cognition behind it.

It is probably exactly because he spent a career considering the cognition behind language that he is not as impressed by LLMs as many others are. I'll readily admit to being expert in neither language and linguistics nor AI, but I am skeptical that anything going on inside an LLM is properly described as "cognition."

does it really matter if it can be described as cognition or not? to me these models are useful for how effective they are, and that's literally it. the processes going on within them are extremely complex and at times very impressive, and whether some arbitrarily undefined word applies or not does not really matter. I think sometimes people forget that words are not maths or logic. when words come into language, no one sits down and makes sure that they're 100% logically and philosophically sound, they just start to be used, usually based on a feeling, and slowly gather and lose meaning over time. perhaps when dictionaries were first written there was some effort to do this, but for lots of words its probably impossible or incredibly difficult even now, never mind 200 years ago, if they could even be bothered in the first place.

to give an example, a quite boring "philosophy question" that's bandied around, usually by children, is "if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?". the answer is that "sound" is a word without a commonly-accepted, logically-derived meaning, for the reasons given above. so if to you the word sound is something human, then the answer is no, but if to you a sound is not something human, then the answer is yes. there's nothing particularly interesting or complex about the thought experiment, it's just a poorly defined word