From Alan Turing to GPT-3: The Evolution of Computer Speech | Otherwords

How did we go from "Hello, World" to ChatGPT? New advancements in technology are making it harder than ever to tell the difference between a computer and a human speaker... but what's going on under the hood? Is it really "language," or just a digital illusion?

New advancements in technology are making it harder than ever to tell the difference between a computer and a human speaker... but what's going on under the hood? Is it really "language," or just a digital illusion?

Otherwords is a new PBS web series on Storied that digs deep into this quintessential human trait of language and fınds the fascinating, thought-provoking, and funny stories behind the words and sounds we take for granted. Incorporating the fıelds of biology, history, cultural studies, literature, and more, linguistics has something for everyone and offers a unique perspective into what it means to be human.

hosted by Dr. Erica Brozovsky, Ph.D.
written by Andrew Matthews
directed by Andrew Matthews & Katie Graham
produced by Katie Graham
animated & edited by Andrew Matthews
executive producer Amanda Fox
Assistant Director of Programming (PBS): Niki Walker
Executives in Charge (PBS): Brandon Arolfo, Adam Dylewski

music by APM

[Meeviche]

I linked my mom to this video because she’s always talking to her phone assistant like it understands her. She wanted that animated brain on a t-shirt. 😆

[Bigfoot_With_Internet_Access]

Plot twist: They're acting like they're faking it so we won't catch on

[MakoSDV]

To quote the great Qui-Gon Jinn: "The ability to speak does not make you intelligent."

[AveryTalksAboutStuff]

It makes me think of that episode of the office where Dwight thinks the Dunder Mifflin computer was sentient. 😂

[MCGeorgeMallory]

Per instructions, I am declaring that I was sent here by PBS Eons, a love of language channels, and the ghost of a series that wasn't nearly infinite enough, at least in duration.

[CerebrumMortum]

This program is a fantastic addition to a fantastic channel!
This chapter brought on some memories. When I was 13, 20 years ago, I got the book "how the brain works". It could be summarized with "we don't know, we think it works this way, sort of, maybe...".

*EVERYONE* predicted general purpose AI is just around the corner, and yet our "little" 'natural language processor' is still way ahead.
Language is so fascinating

[TheMerterm]

As an NLP researcher, this channel and the “otherwords” playlist is a gold mine.

[indi_young]

The animation of words here is AMAZING! I have been mentally visualizing for years what your team animates in a few seconds. (starting around minute 7:32) It is beautiful! Nicely done!

[Apollyon]

Hope this new series keeps going. I love linguistics

[itsamachineworld]

I came here from PBS Eons and I'm so glad to know there's a series on linguistics. I loved studying linguistics and I miss it so much. It's cool to find videos like this of PBS quality. Though having only really watched Eons up until now, I was sad there wasn't a pun at the end of the video, haha.

[lillys]

10:29 "Only that the likely hood of those going together is very very small."

[SupercriticalSnake]

I abso-freakin-lutely love this series! And now I’m curious if expletive infixation trips up AIs like GPT…

[youremakingprogress]

I enjoy this series so much. This is genuinely as entertaining as it is informative.

[animeevergreenathena]

Oh wow...I so wished that my college experience was as cool as this! I tried to study Computer Science as an English/Creative Writing major with a Mandarin Chinese minor, but it didn't pan out for me because it was so hard to create perfect weekly computer programs and write well-written 5 or more page essays in one week increments. So despite the fact that my CS professors knew that I could craft wicked papers on the history of Computer Science, because I wasn't able to comprehend the technical aspects of CS in such a short amount of time without having to make lots of free mistakes prior to the tests, I had no choice, but to choose Team CW as my major. Plus, it didn't help that every single one of my English professors except for my linguistics professor was a hard grader...In any case, thanks for showcasing this!

[annaangelic]

Just another great episode from Otherwords! The sound design here is also super high quality, even for a PBS show. Glad to see this series is getting off to a great start.

[luuketaylor]

Not to take away any of the amazing work that this video went through and is, but this is like Tom Scott! What a great combination of linguistics and computer science. I avidly watch his series on both of these topics, and this channel is such a joy to watch. Storied deserves way more subs.

[mattkuhn]

This was an excellent video! This is literally my field of expertise - I have an MS in computational linguistics. Right now, computers are pretty much all "faking it" - we are a long ways away currently from NLU, Natural Language Understanding. Computers can produce language fairly well for many applications of course, but they don't have any internal knowledge about the language. They're essentially just very complex pattern matchers. The point you made about SNLP at about 5 minutes is precisely correct - even with systems driven by neural networks like GPT-3, which are so complex we don't understand how they are making decisions, at the end of the day it's still a statistical approach. If you're familiar with it, they're basically Searle's Chinese Room. So when it comes to dogs, it doesn't know anything about dogs in any way we would recognize as knowledge. Rather, it has statistical connections that show these kinds of words occur more often around dogs. GPT-3 is very advanced to be sure, but it doesn't represent any true semantic understanding of language.

[DoctorandtheDoll]

This made me miss my AI class in grad school, even though I was mostly too exhausted to really appreciate it at the time lol.

[lgtfad]

Thanks to eons I found this great channel

[EmmettMcMullan]

This is such a cool installment! Thank you for making it