Three years ago, in a bland office at Google’s headquarters, an engineer became convinced that the company’s chatbot had developed consciousness. Blake Lemoine’s widely publicized claims were swiftly dismissed, yet they exemplify a persistent muddle in society’s thinking about artificial intelligence. As language models like ChatGPT churn out increasingly convincing prose, a crucial question emerges: Have machines finally cracked the code of human language?
The evidence seems compelling at first glance. Modern AI systems engage in witty banter, write passable poetry, and help craft legal briefs. This has led some tech evangelists to revive a bold claim first made by Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired magazine, in 2008: that with enough data, theory becomes unnecessary. “Correlation supersedes causation,” he declared, suggesting that patterns alone could reveal all there is to know about the world. Applied to language, this thinking suggests that by ingesting enough text, machines could master human communication.
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