ChatGPT as improv artist, blurry JPEG, or conceptual blender: Models for LLM "cognition"

Abstract: Over the last two years, generative AI models like ChatGPT have gone from niche research projects in the field of Natural Language Processing to tools that have upended the sectors of education, code development, social science, and more. This rapid development is partially due to the fact that these tools have, through gradual updates, developed capabilities that could not have been predicted in November 2022, like the ability to reason spatially, mathematically, and visually. Many users reasonably wonder how—and more importantly why—they work. In this talk, I will approach this subject from an educational research perspective, in which we use theoretical frameworks and models to try to explain the features of complex systems like human (and now machine) learning. I will use three theoretical frameworks—the improv artist (also called the stochastic parrot), the blurry JPEG, and the conceptual blender—to highlight different ways of understanding the capabilities of large language models like ChatGPT, and contrast their implications for how we approach and use these tools in education. 

About the speaker: Tor is an associate professor of physics education research at the Center for Computing in Science Education. He uses ideas from physics to study how humans and AIs learn. His research focuses on how computation can be leveraged to support student creativity and epistemic agency in science learning, how students acquire disciplinary computational literacy, and applications of generative AI to do qualitative research at scale, like literature reviews and survey analysis. Tor holds a PhD in physics education research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where his dissertation work focused on how undergraduate physics students make sense of abstract or tricky physics concepts, the specific strategies they use, and how instructors can help them in that process. Tor also holds a masters in physics from UW-Madison and a bachelors in physics from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota