Conversation

I should contextualise my feelings about ChatGPT a bit. I used to do both linguistics and computer science research. For a brief period of time these overlapped, though I did not enjoy being a computational linguist precisely because NLP was shifting very hard towards statistical bullshit generation.

I am not saying there are not improvements in NLP - I find statistical translations make my life much easier, but *only as a first pass*, for example - but the greatest (popularly consumed) advancements seem to be in generating bullshit, and I find that disheartening.

I am NOT a computational linguist - I switched tracks after a year (largely due to a famously problematic advisor, frankly) and focused on language acquisition - and I am sure there are cool things going on which rely on something better than creating convincing enough statistical parrots - but it seems to me that not a whole lot has changed.