May 4, 2025 – Alexander Renz Translations: DE

GPT and similar models simulate comprehension. They imitate conversations, emotions, reasoning. But in reality, they are statistical probability models, trained on massive text corpora – without awareness, world knowledge, or intent.

What Does GPT Actually Do?#

GPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer) is not a thinking system, but a language prediction model. It calculates which token (word fragment) is most likely to come next – based on the context of previous tokens.

GPT doesn’t know. It just continues. – Emily Bender, linguist and AI critic

No Understanding. No Thinking. No Intent.#

GPT is trained on vast amounts of text – scraped from the internet, books, forums, Wikipedia. From this, it learns statistical patterns. But: GPT has no mental model of the world, no goals, no experience, no self.

It doesn’t distinguish between truth and fiction, between quote and hallucination. Everything is equally likely – as long as it sounds coherent.

The “ELIZA Effect” 2.0#

Back in 1966, people projected deep understanding onto ELIZA – though it only mirrored user input via regex patterns. Today, we project consciousness onto GPT – though it’s just calculating.

“People react to GPT as if it thinks – because it speaks like us. Not because it thinks like us.” – Sherry Turkle, MIT

Illusion Instead of Intelligence#

GPT impresses – but it doesn’t think. It can generate text – but cannot form concepts. It can simulate an argument – but has no position. It can mimic emotion – but feels nothing.

This is known as: syntactic fluency without semantic understanding.

References and Sources#

Conclusion#

GPT is not intelligence. It is the illusion of intelligence, perfected through linguistic patterning and massive data. It’s not the machine that deceives – we let ourselves be deceived.

GPT “works” – not because it understands, but because we’ve made understanding imitable.