Early in the history of computing it was theorized that with a sufficiently complex algorithm, computers could one day be capable of performing every intellectual task a human could. Alan Turing proposed his famous test in 1950: Could a machine talk so well that no one could tell whether they were conversing with a human or a machine? Imagine a blind chat window. You type your questions into the void, and something answers. Your job is to decide whether the something is a someone. Which questions would you ask? How would you try to trip the machine into giving away its true nature?

For decades people imagined what such a test might look like. You might wish to pose tricky logic questions. Or you could ask about common sense, daily life situations of which a machine might not be aware. You might wish to probe it for knowledge that a human would likely know but someone forgot to program into a machine. You might try to test its self-awareness: How does it feel? Can it describe colors and shapes?

And one day near the end of 2022, all of those questions got tossed out the window. When ChatGPT was first released, it didn’t answer every question well. But it answered enough questions, in ways that exceeded our expectations, that it sank the viability of the Turing test. In hindsight, we were wrong to assume that using our language was the definitive way to showcase human-like thinking. The Turing test, as it turned out, was easier for a machine to fail by speaking too well than by speaking too poorly. It didn’t make enough typos. What it lacked in consciousness it made up for in confidence.

Nobody else had ever talked

It’s not too surprising that we thought language would be the test through which we determined thinking. Nobody else had ever talked. Parrots could counterfeit our sounds, but they failed to engage us in conversation across the table. Only humans had this power. Since the dawn of man, we had been unique in our ability to craft words into coherent sentences, and sentences into stories, laws, jokes, prayers, and boundless deceits. Surely anything that could do that would need a mind. Surely if anything was going to converse with us, it would need to think.

ChatGPT is a next-word prediction machine. It works by looking at part of a sentence and guessing the most likely next word. Then it does it again and again until a response is complete. In training, it builds statistical connections between words in vast collections of human writing. It’s not clear why this works so well, but the more compute researchers poured into the furnace, the more the furnace began answering back, and the more intelligent the answers were.

That was a surprise. Somehow intelligence had fallen out of speech rather than the other way around. We thought intelligence would have to come first and speech second. First the mind, then the words. First the thinker, then the talker. But the machines came at it from the other direction. Give them enough human language, enough examples, enough computation, and something that looked like reasoning began to spill out of the gears. Speech began coughing up thought, or something eerily like it. Nobody knew why ChatGPT, a speech machine, could play chess. It just came out of speech, somehow.

And yet the resemblance is not the proof. A machine can describe hunger without a stomach, childhood without ever having been small. It can write about the color blue without eyes or about embarrassment without a face that turns red. The words are there. But whether there is anyone inside is a different matter. A voice no longer guarantees a thinker, but it certainly gives the illusion and draws us to wonder. Have we discovered something astoundingly strange: the experience of being addressed by no one?

And so we are unique for one less reason. For all of history, to be spoken to was to be addressed by another mind. That is no longer true. Our world is suddenly permeated by machines that speak like us. We can tell, for now, that we are still unique in some ways, but one of the medals that has been ours to hold for millennia has been taken down and hung around the neck of a machine.

This post was written by human Nathan Wall and edited by AI.