At the beginning of 2023, there is much talk of AI - artificial intelligence - which has been able to beat chess champions for some time and has now also beaten the world champion in the board game Go. Such triumphs have led to AI being rated higher than human intelligence. Philosophers remind us that intelligent decisions - including moves in chess - reach into the future and that machines know nothing of a time that lies ahead of them.
However, engineers are now teaching machines "deep learning" and they can now diagnose cancer and much more. Computer scientists recommend not overestimating the intelligence of these systems. But if you look at the newspapers, you get the feeling that this view is changing. You can read about the ChatGPT program that can write, and then professors announce that "the quality of texts written by an AI will improve in the future, but the quality of human texts will tend to remain the same." There it is again, the age-old fear that machines will become humans and replace them, but anyone who reflects on the state of affairs is strangely led to the opposite conclusion, namely that it is humans who will become machines.
This is about the production of texts and thus about the pride of writers and journalists who believe that their writing activities create something special that machines can never achieve. But anyone who is now discussing the question of when ChatGTP texts will be better than human texts is looking in the wrong direction. We shouldn't be surprised that machines write like humans, we should rather wonder why many people have been writing like machines for so long. Many of the articles we are presented with consist at best of standardized phrases that we know from numerous press releases and that offend our sense of language. People should not point the finger at machines, but at themselves and work on the quality of their formulations. AI has mastered the language of official announcements, beyond which writing humans should go. It is not the machines that make humans superfluous. They take themselves out of the game if they continue to be sloppy with language and think that it is enough to write simple texts for simple minds. Machines can do that better - fortunately for the imagination.
