Doesn’t AI stand for Always Imitation? Machines are faking it. Computers do what computers do. They crunch numbers. And more numbers. Each letter is a number – think of the ASCII alphabet. Each token is a whole array of numbers. At each artificial neuron, numbers get crunched. And what we see — and believe — is a synthetic text. An imitation. Looks like a text. Sounds like a text. B U T is not a text. It’s tokens. Coming from numbers. Neatly arranged. Based on the numbers. Based on probabilities. Easy to read. Easy to imbue with meaning. Because it is empty form. Easy to impute whatever we believe, hope for, or simply just prompted. A beautiful – and at times useful and at times harmful – imitation game. That’s what Alan Turing, the father of artificial intelligence, who never used that phrase, called it: The Imitation Game. We call it the Turing test. Machines are faking it. Really well.
And what does that mean for language teachers? You can listen to this episode of the podcast Opening AI for language learning, hosted by Phil Hubbard and me, Mat Schulze.
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