Are you part robot? A linguistic anthropologist explains how humans are like ChatGPT – both recycle language

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Likewise, media coverage of human-AI interaction – whether paranoid or starry-eyed – tends to emphasize its newness.

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Monday, June 12, 2023

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Likewise, media coverage of human-AI interaction – whether paranoid or starry-eyed – tends to emphasize its newness.
Interactions with ChatGPT can feel unprecedented, as when a tech journalist couldn’t get a chatbot to stop declaring its love for him.
As a linguistic anthropologist, I find human reactions to ChatGPT the most interesting thing about it.
Chatbots reflect this, revealing tendencies and patterns that are already present in interactions with other humans.

This is in line with Chomsky’s historic recognition that human language could not be produced merely through children’s imitation of adult speakers.
That is the only way to explain why humans – unlike other animals with sophisticated systems of communication – have a theoretically infinite capacity to generate new phrases.
Even though humans are endlessly capable of generating new strings of language, people usually don’t.
The concept of stealing someone else’s words assumes that communication always takes place between people who independently come up with their own original ideas and phrases.

However, that assumption breaks down when Woebot, an AI therapy app, is trained to interact with human clients by human therapists, using conversations from human-to-human therapy sessions.
Meloy found the resulting song “remarkably mediocre” and lacking in intuition, but also uncannily in the zone of a Decemberists song.
In that sense, ChatGPT forces us to consider an age-old question anew: How much of our language is really ours?