The father of free software and founder of the GNU project, Richard Stallman (RMS), recently posted an influential article on his personal website titled "Reasons not to use ChatGPT." In this article, he clearly expresses strong opposition to the popular AI chat tool ChatGPT.
Stallman starts by stating that ChatGPT is not truly "intelligent" and therefore should not be called "artificial intelligence." He defines "intelligence" as the ability to recognize, understand, and master knowledge within a specific field, which ChatGPT completely lacks. Stallman believes that this tool cannot understand its own output; its generation process is more like randomly putting together words rather than conscious thinking. This leads him to call it a "nonsense generator," as the content it produces is often irrelevant and ignores reality entirely.
Image note: The image was generated by AI, provided by the image licensing service Midjourney
Aside from questioning the intelligence of ChatGPT, Stallman also points out that using this tool means losing users' computing freedom. He emphasizes that ChatGPT is a proprietary software running on cloud servers, and users have no access to its source code or executable files. This usage method causes users to lose control over their own computing processes when interacting with the server. He believes that relying on others' servers for computation essentially undermines one's computing freedom.
In this article, Stallman calls on the public to be vigilant about these "generative systems." He emphasizes that many people's misunderstandings of these tools lead to unnecessary trust. He hopes everyone can spread this important message: do not trust systems that are merely word games, because their understanding of language meaning is extremely limited and incorrect.
Stallman's views provide us with a new perspective to re-examine the direction of current technological development, especially in the application and impact of artificial intelligence.
