AI is changing scientists’ understanding of language learning

Artificial intelligence and language

By | Morten Christiansen , The Conversation

The language of everyday interaction tends to be messy and incomplete, and chaotic, leading many language scientists to believe that children must have a grammar template wired into their brains to help them overcome the limitations of their language experience, writes Morten Christiansen, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Psychology, in an op-ed in Ars Technica.

“But new insights into language learning are coming from an unlikely source: artificial intelligence,” Christiansen and co-author Paulo Contreras Kallens write in the piece. “A new breed of large AI language models can write newspaper articles, poetry, and computer code and answer questions truthfully after being exposed to vast amounts of language input. And even more astonishingly, they all do it without the help of grammar.”

Read the full story in Ars Technica.

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