Doug Wilson
1 min readFeb 8, 2025

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Nope. Sorry.

It knows nothing. It solves nothing.

It can generate often-convincing text-based output by searching, mimicking, and to some degree synthesizing example text in its vast store of training data, initially created by humans who actually do know and who actually have solved things.

It's a single type of problem with output in the appropriate flavor.

Generating an essay (based on loads of example essays) or a poem (based on loads of example poems) or a puzzle solution (based on loads of example puzzle solutions) ...

That the output is in different domains, e.g. research, poetry, music, drawing, etc, doesn't mean it's not a one-trick pony. It is.

When humans do this (much more slowly and usually much less comprehensively), they may utilize domain-specific languages (DSLs), formatting, markup, etc, e.g. ASCII text, HTML, SVG, etc, to express their output.

Hmmm, I wonder where ChatGPT learned to do this? Oh, that's right.

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Doug Wilson
Doug Wilson

Written by Doug Wilson

Doug Wilson is an experienced software application architect, music lover, problem solver, former film/video editor, philologist, and father of four.

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