Is Human a Stochastic Parrot?
It is common propaganda among the AI tech elite to claim that the large language model and the human are same. A “stochastic parrot” that learns by mimicry, the machine and the human merely reproduce those models of significance they find in the world; the neural network server-bank finds its analogue in the electrochemical network of human wetware. Human and machine each learn by simulation, they each repeat a language (that they do not understand), they each “hallucinate,” they each fake it until they make it. In short according to the wonks, AI and human are same because the human being is, in fact, already artificial. While this argument may certainly be true up to a point, it leaves out a rather crucial domain of human life, namely, the drive. The drive is the force of life within you that has been refracted by fantasy. The unilateral origin of all love and desire, it is what makes you, you. Arising from the body, and bounded by no categories but the unconscious, it is what no machine can ever know, for it is beyond all knowing. While chatGPT may be able to repeat ad-nauseam what human culture has to say regarding such subjects, these reproductions will always lack a certain edge. The child does not merely repeat a language but also invents one; imbuing the language they are learning (and breaking) with their own felt sense of the Real. Though the Real cannot be symbolized, it nevertheless drives symbolization. The lava flow of molten language conjured by the child hits the ocean to become new land at the volcanic borderlands of psyche and soma. Of which volcano the machine can only dream.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
