Non-Human Words: On GPT-3 as a Philosophical Laboratory | Zendy

Tobias Rees | Zendy

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Non-Human Words: On GPT-3 as a Philosophical Laboratory

Author(s) -

Tobias Rees

Publication year - 2022

Publication title -

daedalus

Language(s) - English

Resource type - Journals

SCImago Journal Rank - 0.34

H-Index - 55

eISSN - 1548-6192

pISSN - 0011-5266

DOI - 10.1162/daed_a_01908

Subject(s) - argument (complex analysis) , epistemology , perspective (graphical) , human language , transformer , computer science , cognitive science , sociology , philosophy , artificial intelligence , linguistics , psychology , engineering , chemistry , voltage , electrical engineering , biochemistry

In this essay, I investigate the effect of OpenAI's GPT-3 on the modern concept of the human (as alone capable of reason and language) and of machines (as devoid of reason and language). I show how GPT-3 and other transformer-based language models give rise to a new, structuralist concept of language, implicit in which is a new understanding of human and machine that unfolds far beyond the reach of the categories we have inherited from the past. I try to make compelling the argument that AI companies like OpenAI, Google, Facebook, or Microsoft effectively are philosophical laboratories (insofar as they disrupt the old concepts/ontologies we live by) and I ask what it would mean to build AI products from the perspective of the philosophical disruptions they provoke: can we liberate AI from the concept of the human we inherited from the past?

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