There has been a lot of discussion since AI was made
available to everyone in the form of ChatGPT and
Midjourney. Is AI intelligent? Have people had their
time as a thinking, creative being? What is authentically
experienced and felt, and what is just simulated? And
how can we tell the difference?
The fact is, ChatGPT doesn’t bother about whether
its words are true or false, good or bad. It has no idea
what it’s producing. It also doesn’t know the boundary
between fact and fiction. And it doesn’t have any empathy,
so it can’t empathise with people. After all: algorithms
don’t have feelings.
Philosopher and literary scholar Hannes Bajohr said in an
SFR discussion group that you can’t even vaguely compare
ChatGPT with human intelligence. It has no body, it doesn’t
live in a world and it doesn’t communicate with people
in the way we do. We’re watching a system producing
text. As Bajohr puts it: “That means we are dealing
with an automated bullshit machine.” The technical
term “bullshit” can be traced back to phi
