I have read more than is probably healthy about the Chinese room and variants since it was first published. I’ve gone back and forth on several ideas:

• There is no understanding
• The person in the room doesn’t understand, but the system does
• We are all just Chinese rooms without knowing it (where either of the first 2 points might apply)

Since the advent of ChatGPT, or, more properly, my awareness of it, the confusion has only increased. My current thinking, which is by no means robust, is that humans may be little more than “meatGPT” systems. Admittedly, that is probably a cynical reaction to my sense that a lot of people seem to be running on automatic a lot of the time combined with an awareness that nearly everything new is built on top of or a variation on what came before.

I don’t use ChatGPT for anything (yet) for the same reasons I don’t depend too heavily on advice from others:

• I suspect that most people know a whole lot less than they think they do
• I very likely know little enough myself
• I definitely don’t know enough to reliably distinguish between someone truly knowledgeable and a bullshitter.

I’ve not yet seen anything to suggest that ChatGPT is reliably any better than a bullshitter. Which is not nothing, I guess, but is at least a little dangerous.