Recently Noam Chomsky‘s opinion on AI as published in the New York Times has been making the rounds again, and the arguments against what he wrote are… aspiring to juvenile when it comes to the comments sections.

While he’s probably best known for his social activism, Chomsky is one of the founders of cognitive science and is by no means someone whose opinions should be dismissed lightly.

I disagreed with him on Ukraine and unless his opinion has changed I still do. He seemed to be focused on the quantity of life, whereas in listening to Ukrainian voices I heard them more concerned about their quality of life. “Life free or die” could summarize what I was hearing, with their option of being annexed in any way or form being something that didn’t seem like something they were willing to do. And why should they?

The point is that when you’re disagreeing with someone who has certainly demonstrated a high level of thinking, it should be at least at a similar level of thinking.

In that regard, searching for a rebuttal to his points was sad. The top result on a Google search was Jon Cronin’s asking ChatGPT what it thought about it.

The answer itself was evasive and went to it’s talking points like a politician. It glossed over much of what he said.

This rebuttal, written by a human and found much lower in search rankings, is guilty of pretty much the same thing by ignoring the points raised and starting off with, “but it’s good for the global economy…”

Which, amusingly, is sort of Chomsky’s point – that in pushing this advance in technology, which he did not deny, the chasing of the bottom line is somehow supposed to make up for a lot of rubbish.

That’s kind of what got us here, and where this is isn’t that palatable for everyone. He also pointed out the deficiencies.

His points are valid, whether liked or not, and true. This is why I wrote ‘A Tale of Two AIs‘. In Chomsky’s opinion piece, he’s discussing the reality, and in every rebuttal I have read so far which includes ChatGPT’s response posted on a LinkedIn page (people still use it to post stuff!) is about how AI is being marketed.

It’s not a disagreement. It’s just trying to talk over the reality of what these generative models actually are… so far.

That’s not debate.