ChatGPT
Author: lamescholar - 2023-09-22
Locked database
Judging from ChatGPT’s performance, OpenAI got rich database of texts. It means they digitized everything long time ago, just hid it behind the locked door. And there are people who hate even mediated distribution of this database of texts.
A bad moment of ChatGPT
It just gives an extract from its database, leaving you completely alienated from sources, methods, practice of producing the result. At the same time it got great potential of research assistant if sources, methods, practice will be exercised by majority of people.
Science is not some text, compiled from other texts. It’s understanding, evolution of thought, it’s constant self-improvement of thought that sourced from interaction and transformation of reality through production, discussion, developing tools, implementing knowledge in work, art, everyday life.
This dread of ChatGPT replacing average authors gives me Baudrillardian vibe. French philosopher Baurdillard wrote an article called Requiem for the Media. The idea of this article is that the very form of communication one-many exclude the possibility of dialog, of ambivalent communication. Mechanisms of feedback are just extra variables of broadcast. Key moment is that the prevailing form of communication is broadcast, all gazes pointed at broadcast. Everybody climb this mount of popularity, trying to integrate into this mechanism of distribution of information, when you talk to your audience in such a way you never get an answer from it. It’s just fixated message you recorded that is spreaded that nobody can negotiate with. There is even a meme about it in Runet - to talk with copypasta.
So, why I get this vibe? Because with ChatGPT in this scheme of communication you don’t even need the author to produce a message. So, this scheme completely exclude people talking to each other. The only entity remained is generated message distributed through media.
Knowledge is a process
If you don’t read and think, you just float in this this pile of discourses without touching the reality. It’s just dead thought bleached from any connection with reality. You lose sense of who you are, what your views are, how they originate, develop, self-proving, self-explaining. You got the final result, the conclusion without all the important part - your worldview, style of thought, set of arguments, your own elaboration of them.
Today we got the prevalence of image over the process. In this regard I really liked the book by Nagel What Does It All Mean? He set the questions that I recall thinking about on my own.
I like how instead of stereotypical solutions, which ChatGPT would give, he crushes you with these questions urging you to cope with them by yourself, urging you start to think.
Knowledge is a process.
Potential
I’m very enthusiastic about ChatGPT’s potential. Apart from research assistance you can read any language - its translation is pretty stable and whole. You can actually read the book on language you don’t know with help of bilingual dictionary.
We got Internet, we got digitization technologies, we got OCR, we got decent translation tool - all the technological necessities to explore. But all these technologies developed under (red alert) capitalism. They are strangled by copyright bullshit, patents, corporate secret, paywall, that stand in the way of distribution of sources and tools to learn.
Of course copyright exists for purpose. That’s the way the production of information stay profitable. We can’t just banish the copyright. Copyright must be replaced with alternative that pay for production and not at the expense of distribution.
Like public funding, crowdfounding, selffounding (if expenses to buy sources and tools for research are absent, then you just need to eat something, live somewhere while you work).
Artificial intelligence
ChatGPT is a tool to extract review from database or perform translation. That’s it. So, if somebody fantasies another - it’s really silly misconception. For them Chomsky wrote an article in NY Times.