The rise of the machines, maybe

I’ve been playing with ChatGPT lately with mixed results. The artificial intelligence (AI) writing tool can do amazing things, but so far human writers don’t need to worry about their jobs.

I’ve “assigned” ChatGPT some book reviews over the past few weeks. They come out perfectly written, with no errors at all in spelling, punctuation, or word choice. (This alone will make the work suspect if turned in by an undergraduate or a high school student.) But the reviews appear formulaic and shallow, full of generalizations without examples to back them up.

In addition, ChatGPT can review only books that it has “read.” When I told it to review a book that I use in a master’s-level course, it replied something like this: Sorry, I don’t know the book, and I’m not allowed to look it up on Amazon and find it.

Not only that, but the AI can make rookie mistakes. When I assigned it to review Richard Niebuhr’s book Christ and Culture (see the previous post), it produced another formulaic review and attributed the work to Richard’s brother Reinhold. When I told it, “Write a review of niebuhr, Christ and culture,” the bot named the better-known brother as the author.

But look at this conversation about the Turing test and biblical Greek:

Hey chatbot, can you pass the turing test?

No, I am designed to assist with information and respond to questions, not pass as a human in a Turing test.

That’s too bad I would like to have a conversation with you.

I’d be happy to have a conversation with you! What would you like to talk about?

Let’s talk about participles in ancient Greek.

Sure! Ancient Greek has two types of participles: present and aorist. The present participle is used to describe ongoing action and is formed with the present tense stem of a verb and the ending “-nt-“. The aorist participle is used to describe completed action and is formed with the aorist tense stem of a verb and the ending “-men-“. Both participles can be used in a variety of ways, including as nouns, adjectives, and verbs.

You understand Greek better than my students do.

I’m a language model trained on a vast amount of text data, so I have a lot of information about many different topics, including ancient Greek. However, I don’t have emotions or personal experiences, so my understanding is limited to the information I was trained on.

So how does the first verse of the Gospel of John go in Greek?

The first verse of the Gospel of John in Greek is:

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.

This can be translated to English as:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Wave of the future? Let’s wait and see.