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Maddie Arro

September 11, 2023

Megan Shipley

Engl 110

Chomsky and Wolfram Assignment 1

After reading the articles “What is Chat GPT Doing and Why Does it Work” by Stephen

Wolfram and “The False Promise of Chat GPT” by Noam Chomsky I have gotten a better

understanding on Chat GPT. There are many benefits of artificial intelligence but the technology

itself isn’t always reliable. We saw two different sides to the overall topic of Chat GPT and how

differently it can be used. In this essay I will be exploring ChatGPT from different perspectives

including those of Stephen Wolfram, who explains Chat GPT in terms of a “large language

model”, Noam Chomsky et al, who explain ChatGPT as missing a human and moral element and

my own perspective having seen and used Chat GPT in a limited capacity.

I was first exposed to ChatGPT by my father who works in technology sales for a

division of Microsoft. His company was involved in developing and selling different forms of

ChatGPT software and he was explaining the concept to my family when I was home for the

holidays. I must admit that both my brother and I as high school and college students thought

that this sounded amazing. Not that we wanted to “cheat” perse, but to have help with generating

ideas sounded fun. Until we learned that it didn’t really work this way. Because this is artificial

intelligence and not the human brain, it only works to form complete thoughts and essays, not

ideas and parts of speech. Also, we learned quickly that as fast as this was becoming popular

with students, once again, as Chomsky et al emphasize there was a missing human element. That
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is, teachers and professors were able to determine that some of their students' work was not

original and the education profession was quick to develop tools to help check the validity of

their students’ work. Soon after this, I experienced a little AI character that appeared on my

Snap Chat screen. Had I not already been made aware of what Chat GPT was, I admit that this

could have been frightening. This little thing could track you location, your activity across other

apps as well as add to conversations. This is a little concerning as a young college woman. The

fact that this invention could just appear in my private conversations was a little weird. Many

people I know tried to explore all the uses of the AI that was connected to Snap Chat, but

because of the infinite number of possibilities that it generates they have yet to become “smarter

than the AI”.

According to the article by Stephen Wolfram, “what Chat GPT is always fundamentally

trying to do is to produce a reasonable continuation of whatever text it’s got so far.” It works for

words that have similar meanings and then puts together a group of words that would come next

by using probabilities. It seems that it is just asking its own computer brain over and over and

over, what word would fit in here next best? And then it puts a word in. Sometimes it can even

just do partial words and made-up words, which is how I am guessing that some of the teachers

are able to spot when students are “cheating". Wolfram also points out that in using a probability

formula we would expect Chat GPT to use the highest probability matching words. However, the

research has shown that if those words were always chosen the information become more rote

and uninteresting. Choosing lower probability words made for much more interest and variation

among the essays. Probability among letters and strings of letters can be more predictable than

longer runs of letters or whole words. There are billions and trillions of letter and word
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combinations so it would be virtually impossible to predict all the endless possibilities. Instead,

they have made a model that works toward eliminating the probabilities of Chat GPT.

From the viewpoint of Chomsky et al this type of “machine learning” or “general

intelligence” created by ChatGPT is not a good thing. They are quick to point out that these

programs can be helpful in some ways they are very defective in the fact that they will never be

able to use language in the same way as humans. They claim, “The human mind is not, like Chat

GPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching.” (This is exactly what

Wolfram told us ChatGPT is!) Chomsky et all gives the example of a young child taking a small

amount of information and “unconsciously” and “automatically” developing grammar. They

point out that the child learns very differently from a machine. They point out that part of what is

missing in machine thinking is description and actual thinking. Also, humans can fail, machines

cannot. Machines are capable of merging different types of thought, but not of prediction.

Chomsky says, “The correct explanations of language are complicated and cannot be learned by

just marinating in big data.” Chomsky et al is also quick to point out that true intelligence is also

moral intelligence. Our thinking must be morally and ethically based, and this is impossible for

machines. When asked to answer questions dealing with morality, Chat GPT must rely on its

human programmers. Chat GPT does not have the ability to think emotionally or to have

thinking based on opinions, only data. According to the beliefs in this article, this causes an

imbalance between creativity and constraint.

In conclusion, the articles written by Noam Chomsky and Wolfram give us a wealth of

information on Chat GPT, both positive and negative. Wolfram’s article explains the mechanics

of Chat GPT as a large language model based on infinite possibilities, while Chomsky et al are
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quick to point out that without the human and moral elements involved in writing there can never

be a true comparison to the power of the human mind. As someone who has experienced Chat

GPT firsthand I see both sides of this argument, and while it is tempting to give in to the “infinite

possibilities” of the computer-generated language, I feel that my voice as an author and the

passion that I include in my writing could never be duplicated by a machine.

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Chomsky, Noam, et al. “Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT.” The New York

Times, 8 Mar. 2023.

www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-

Wolfram, Stephen. “What Is ChatGPT Doing ... and Why Does It Work?” Stephen Wolfram

Writings RSS, 14 Feb. 2023.

writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/
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Process Note

After receiving feedback from my classmate and Megan I had to go back and look over
my grammar. I started a lot of sentences with words that should not be at the beginning of a
sentence. I had some punctuation to fix and some words to add in and take out. I also
added a little more information into spaces in the essay that felt they were lacking a little.