“To write history is to give their physiognomy to datessaid the philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), that is to say, giving each event its true face. » The launch of ChatGPT, on November 30, 2022, is one of those dates from which we say that, from then on, nothing will be the same again. Because what must be called the intellectual and creative turning point of artificial intelligence (AI) was inaugurated. And, to understand its full scope, it is appropriate to use a literal formula. It is now up to systems to carry out tasks which, until now, mobilized our intellectual and creative faculties.
These attributes add to, without replacing, the cognitive and organizational dimension of AI. The one that has been at work for around fifteen years, responsible for interpreting increasingly diverse situations, but also for recommending, accordingly, actions to be taken. Signals that guide human behavior are now joined by the technological capacity to produce symbols.
Pandora's box has been opened and it will not close again. We can bet that each anniversary will be punctuated by ever more breathtaking new announcements, to the point that, by the end of the decade, we will come to find derisory, or very old-fashioned, the act of writing, designing images and music.
Robotic Oracles
Given such serious changes, do you think we have mobilized to meet the challenges? That is to say that they were engaged – from the 1is December 2022, and at all levels of society – areas for reflection and action? Quite the opposite, we have seen crowds of hundreds of millions of individuals throwing themselves at these robotic oracles.
-While the first question we should have asked ourselves is that of our children. In a few years, they will ask us why they must go to school, learn grammar, spelling, in short, to express themselves well, if machines, with a simple instruction, are able to write for them. But no, this fundamental issue was not part of our concerns.
There are other crucial points, which fall into three categories. First, the type of language produced, which we would be very wrong to imagine is similar to ours. Because what characterizes these robots is that they dissect textual corpora on the Internet in order to derive semantic laws. The generated statements proceed only from statistical analyzes and probabilistic correlation. If there is such a term, then the next term selected will be the one which has been identified as being, according to usage histories, the most recurring in succession. In this, what has already happened tends to be formulated.
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