Indrek Reiland: "Does ChatGPT Even Use Words?"

Indrek Reiland, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies: "Does ChatGPT Even Use Words?"

Abstract
Recent philosophical discussions of LLMs and chatbots have largely focused on questions about meaning, understanding, and speech acts. Yet there is a more basic question that has received surprisingly little attention: whether systems like ChatGPT even use words at all or whether their outputs are mere orthographic strings. In this talk I will discuss this question in the context of recent views about human word use, attempting to see whether there is any basis for a positive answer.