AI platforms like ChatGPT are widely understood to be sophisticated prediction machines. Trained on vast troves of content ranging from news articles and books to film scripts and Reddit posts, they anticipate the next most likely letters and words when prompted. While their responses can give the impression they’re sentient thinkers, that sci-fi scenario hasn’t yet panned out.
But new UC Berkeley research reveals for the first time that AI chatbots can now analyze sentences like a trained linguist. The study, which will be published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence,provides a glimpse into how AI models are improving and also challenges the idea that humans are unique in our ability to think about language.
With roots in linguistics and philosophy, our ability to think deeply about words and sentence structure is a defining human cognitive feat, said Gašper Beguš, a Berkeley associate professor of linguistics and lead author of the research. But that ability to talk about and manipulate language — a process called metalinguistics — is becoming the domain of AI chatbots, too.
“Our new findings suggest that the most advanced large language models are beginning to bridge that gap,” Beguš said. “Not only can they use language, they can reflect on how language is organized.”