Non-Human Words: On GPT-3 as a Philosophical Laboratory

Abstract

In this essay, I investigate the effect of OpenAI’s GPT-3 on the modern concept of the human (as alone capable of reason and language) and of machines (as devoid of reason and language). I show how GPT-3 and other transformer-based language models give rise to a new, structuralist concept of language, implicit in which is a new understanding of human and machine that unfolds far beyond the reach of the categories we have inherited from the past. I try to make compelling the argument that AI companies like OpenAI, Google, Facebook, or Microsoft effectively are philosophical laboratories (insofar as they disrupt the old concepts/ontologies we live by) and I ask what it would mean to build AI products from the perspective of the philosophical disruptions they provoke: can we liberate AI from the concept of the human we inherited from the past?