I first learned how Large Language Models work from this provocatively titled article: ChatGPT is Bullshit. When I saw the title, I clicked through because I thought it would be a fun, “joke” article, but what I found was a serious attempt to explain the non-intuitive (to me) way that so called “artificial intelligence” large-language models like ChatGPT work. I was stunned (and angered) to learn that large-language models don’t even try to “understand” or determine “meaning” from text: they use complex statistical procedures to analyze large blocks of text and determine likely large blocks of text. They are fancy text prediction. That’s it.

It might be important and useful to help students and others understand this underlying process, so I decided to make this explainer/discussion starter as a possible way teachers, etc. can start conversations about what so called “Artificial Intelligence” is. The title reveals my conclusion, so people who use this may want to change the title of the doc: Whatever AI is, it sure ain’t human (that link should ask you if you want to make a copy you can edit).

Reference: Hicks, M.T., Humphries, J. & Slater, J. ChatGPT is bullshit. Ethics Inf Technol 26, 38 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5