Free Your Brain from ChatGPT "Thinking"

About this episode

The episode discusses how ChatGPT's thinking process can undermine independent thought and offers a method to change this.

If you you’re someone who values being able think independently, then you should be troubled by the fact that your brain’s operates all too much like ChatGPT. I’m going to explain how that undermines your ability to think for yourself, but I’ll also give you a key way to change it. How ChatGPT “Thinks” Let’s first understand how ChatGPT “thinks.” ChatGPT is one of several Artificial Intelligences that’s called a Large Language Model or LLM. All LLMs use bulk sources of language—like articles and blogs they find on the internet—to find trends in what words are most likely to follow other words. To do so, they identify key words that stand out as most likely to lead to other words. Those key words are called “tokens.” Tokens are the words that cue the LLM to look for other words. So, as a simple example for the sake of argument, let’s say we ask an LLM, “what do politicians care about most?” When the LLM receives that question, it creates two tokens: “politicians” and “care.” The rest of the words are irrelevant. Then, the LLM scours the internet for the its two tokens. Though I did not run this through an LLM, it might find that the words most likely to follow the sequence…

People in this episode

Host: Steve Pearlman, Ph.D.

Topics covered

• independent thinking
• artificial intelligence
• language models
• cognitive processes
• self-improvement

Keywords

• ChatGPT
• independent thinking
• language models
• tokens
• artificial intelligence

Mentioned in this episode

Products: ChatGPT, Large Language Model

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