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Non-Human Words: On GPT-3 as a Philosophical Laboratory | American Academy of Arts and Sciences

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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? Tobias Rees is the Founder and CEO of Transformations of the Human (tofth.org). Prior to founding ToftH, he served as Reid Hoffman Professor of Hum

Spring 2022 Non-Human Words: On GPT-3 as a Philosophical Laboratory Author Tobias Rees View PDF To Dædalus issue Abstract In this essay, I investigate the effect of Open AI ’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

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