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ChatGPT (Feb 13 Version) is a Chinese Room

arXiv 2304.12411 ↗First posted 19 Feb 2023cs.CLcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

ChatGPT has gained both positive and negative publicity after reports suggesting that it is able to pass various professional and licensing examinations. This suggests that ChatGPT may pass Turing Test in the near future. However, a computer program that passing Turing Test can either mean that it is a Chinese Room or artificially conscious. Hence, the question of whether the current state of ChatGPT is more of a Chinese Room or approaching artificial consciousness remains. Here, I demonstrate that the current version of ChatGPT (Feb 13 version) is a Chinese Room. Despite potential evidence of cognitive connections, ChatGPT exhibits critical errors in causal reasoning. At the same time, I demonstrate that ChatGPT can generate all possible categorical responses to the same question and response with erroneous examples; thus, questioning its utility as a learning tool. I also show that ChatGPT is capable of artificial hallucination, which is defined as generating confidently wrong replies. It is likely that errors in causal reasoning leads to hallucinations. More critically, ChatGPT generates false references to mimic real publications. Therefore, its utility is cautioned.

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References · 6

  1. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
  2. 2022Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generationcited by 2,056
  3. 2022BioGPT: Generative Pre-trained Transformer for Biomedical Text Generation and Miningcited by 531
  4. 2020Artificial Intelligence is stupid and causal reasoning won't fix itcited by 20
  5. 2020Will we ever have Conscious Machines?cited by 7
  6. 2020Norm violation in online communities -- A study of Stack Overflow commentscited by 4

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  3. 2023Complementary Advantages of ChatGPTs and Human Readers in Reasoning: Evidence from English Text Reading Comprehension
  4. 2023GPTEval: A Survey on Assessments of ChatGPT and GPT-4
  5. 2024RAGged Edges: The Double-Edged Sword of Retrieval-Augmented Chatbots
  6. 2023ChatGPT is a Remarkable Tool -- For Experts
  7. 2023Chatbots as Problem Solvers: Playing Twenty Questions with Role Reversals
  8. 2025Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Language Models via Causal Reasoning