Abstract
Advanced NLP Procedures as Premises for the Reconstruction of the Idea of Knowledge The article presents the current state of development of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, in particular the GPT-3 language model, and presents its consequences for understanding the phenomenon of knowledge. The NLP technology has been experiencing remarkable development recently. The GPT-3 language model presents a level of advancement that allows it to generate texts as answers to general questions, as summaries of the presented text, etc., which reach the level surpassing the analogous level of human texts. These algorithmic operations lead to the determination of the probability distribution of its components. Texts generated by such a model should be considered as autonomous texts, using immanent, implicit knowledge embedded in language. This conclusion raises questions about the status of such knowledge. Help in the analysis is provided also by the theory of discourse, as well as the theory of discursive space based on it, that proposes the interpretation of knowledge as a trajectory of discourses in a dynamical space. Recognizing that knowledge may also be autonomous, and in particular not be at the exclusive disposal of humans, leads to the question of the status of artificial cognitive agents, such as the GPT-3 language model.
Funding Information
  • Narodowe Centrum Nauki (2018/29/B/HS1/01882)

This publication has 18 references indexed in Scilit: