"This is the premise of "Wordplay," an episode of the 1980s reboot of The Twilight Zone. As time progresses, people around Lowery begin speaking in an even more jumbled manner, using familiar words in unfamiliar ways. Eventually, Lowery resigns himself to relearning English from his son's ABC book. The last scene shows him running his hands over an illustration of a dog, underneath which is printed the word Wednesday."
""Wordplay" offers a lesson on the nature of error: Small and inconspicuous changes to the norm can be more disorienting and dangerous than larger, wholesale ones. For that reason, the episode also has something to teach about truth and falsehood in ChatGPT and other such generative-AI products. By now everyone knows that large language models-or LLMs, the systems underlying chatbots-tend to invent things. They make up legal cases and recommend nonexistent software."
Bill Lowery experiences progressive linguistic breakdown when people around him begin using familiar words in unfamiliar ways, starting with a coworker saying "dinosaur" instead of lunch and a family scene where his son rejects his "dinosaur." The confusion escalates until Lowery must relearn English from an ABC book and sees a dog labeled "Wednesday." The narrative illustrates that small, inconspicuous changes to language can be more disorienting and dangerous than wholesale shifts. Large language models invent facts and are labeled as producing "hallucinations," but such models do not hold beliefs or know the truth of their outputs.
Read at The Atlantic
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