Daniel Kehlmann in The Guardian:
The great discoveries of humanity have always taught us that we are not masters in our own house: Copernicus removed the Earth from the centre of the cosmos, Darwin spoiled our species’ idea of divine creation, Freud showed that we neither know nor control our desires. The humiliation by AI is subtler but just as profound: we have demonstrated that for intellectual activities we considered deeply human, we are not needed; these can be automated on a statistical basis, the “idle talk”, to use Heidegger’s term, literally gets by without us and sounds reasonable, witty, superficial and sympathetic – and only then do we truly understand that it has always been like this: most of the time, we communicate on autopilot.
Since I’ve been using the large language model, I can actually perceive it: I’m at a social event, making small talk, and suddenly, sensitised by GPT, I feel on my tongue how one word calls up the next, how one sentence leads to another, and I realise, it’s not me speaking, not me as an autonomous individual, it’s the conversation itself that is happening.
More here.
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