Good morning, Marketer, a cautionary tale.
Let me take you back in time to 1950 and the publication of a philosophical paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” written by a young computer scientist named Alan Turing. Let’s agree that Turing was a computing genius who played a major role, not just in winning World War 2, but in creating the world we live in today.
He wasn’t a great philosopher. His paper argued that if a computer’s responses to prompts were indistinguishable from those of a human being, it would be reasonable to attribute intelligence to the computer. Today, we can go online, play with a tool like ChatGPT, and realize how wrong Turing was.
Certainly, some of ChatGPT’s responses are indistinguishable from human writing. But we are constantly reminded that ChatGPT neither knows nor cares whether its responses are correct or not. It’s acting based on statistical predictions developed from a large data set. Asked “Is it raining?,” ChatGPT has neither the ability — nor the intelligence — to look out of the window and see.
Kim Davis,
Editorial Director
