Artificial intelligence is everywhere, and the field of language is no exception. The combination of technology and language has been very fruitful for decades, but in recent months we’ve seen some particularly impressive advances that have been very well received by the general public. We’ve seen chatbots like ChatGPT engage in fluid conversations with users, provide creative responses, and display linguistic sophistication that ranges from amazing to terrifying. Interacting with these systems is so natural that a former Google employee said the LaMDA AI model was a sentient being. Do these talking gizmos have the same language skills as humans? Can we assume that they have minds capable of feeling and thinking like us? We will try to contextualize some aspects of the relationship between language and artificial intelligence and explain why we cannot say that they have our language ability.
Source: El Diario