Recently, ChapGPT has sparked a heated debate. If this tool is so disturbing, it is because it simulates natural language so well that it raises doubts about the automated origin of the text. The machine would thus have become intelligent enough to pass the famous Turing test. However, we still need to agree on what “intelligence” means. The evolution of machine translation (MT) throws an interesting light on the question here.
The search for a TA system arose from the need for the Allies during World War II to translate messages from the Germans. These were the beginnings of computer science applied to human languages, of the search for an AI capable of “understanding” our language. The results have been pitiful for a long time, whereas in recent years TA systems have sometimes shown amazing performance. However, their increasing precision is in fact only due to the explosion of pre-translated content available on the Web and to the repetitiveness of our linguistic behavior. These tools are in fact only calculators regurgitating the most “probable” translations. There is no “sentient” intelligence there.
At the start of my career as a language professional, my mentor, seeing me struggling on a technical text, told me: “To translate a text into electricity, you have to feel the world like an electron. »
This slightly wacky piece of advice contained a profound truth. At its core, a natural language, to be understood, must be embodied, that is, experienced in a body. Even if we take terms as “logical” as the prepositions “on”, “in”, “under”, etc., to understand them, we will spontaneously appeal to proprioception, which locates the body in space. It is this “organic” link between oneself and the world that gives them “meaning”. Intelligence is thus made of resonance, of sympathy with what surrounds us.
What does a machine understand when it generates the statement “sky blue”? Nothing, nada ! It only spits out pixels from a binary code “01100010 01101100”. Whereas for humans, this “blue” was felt in the park, on a beach, in a field. The meaning of the word “blue”, in short, is blue experienced, sensorially, sensually.
TA, just like ChapGPT, is just a colossal trompe-l’oeil, a trompe-l’oreille, etc. These skinless, eyeless, mouthless, lifeless tools understand nothing of our language. Talking about their intelligence is… nonsense.