Shitty First Drafts and The Curious Case of Zebra Fish – Why Linguistics Matters in AI
You won’t find great writers like John McPhee or Anne Lamott using ChatGPT to write for them. You won’t find linguistics experts, who go out into the field to conduct ethnographic research, using ChatGPT to write for them because all great writing relies on specific, relevant details that are fresh and derived from the source. This is either a person that you can talk to, or a vetted document where the person is being quoted, but it is not information that ChatGPT is pulling from somewhere in the bowels of its “memory.”
This is obvious when you think about it, but we tend to overlook how important primary sources are. This is what these AI tools are searching the web for in the beginning, but they are doing it without context, missing the most important patterns of human language. So, when you work inside the tool, you have no idea who or what the information is derived from. It’s just random content that the model was “trained” on. This is erroneous and dangerous and in order for these tools to be truly useful, we must demand transparency
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