"Among the myriad abilities that humans possess, which ones are uniquely human? Language has been a top candidate at least since Aristotle, who wrote that humanity was "the animal that has language." Even as large language models such as ChatGPT superficially replicate ordinary speech, researchers want to know if there are specific aspects of human language that simply have no parallels in the communication systems of other animals or artificially intelligent devices."
"For some in the linguistic community, language models not only don't have reasoning abilities, they can't. This view was summed up by Noam Chomsky, a prominent linguist, and two coauthors in 2023, when they wrote in The New York Times that "the correct explanations of language are complicated and cannot be learned just by marinating in big data." AI models may be adept at using language, these researchers argued, but they're not capable of analyzing language in a sophisticated way."
Human language has long been proposed as a uniquely human ability. Scholars debate whether large language models can reason about language itself or only mimic surface speech. Some prominent critics argue that statistical training on vast data cannot produce sophisticated linguistic analysis. Multiple large language models were evaluated on diverse linguistic tests, including generalizing rules of an invented language. Most models failed to parse linguistic rules as humans do. One model demonstrated advanced analysis comparable to a linguistics graduate student, performing diagramming, resolving multiple ambiguities, and using recursion, challenging assumptions about AI limits in linguistic reasoning.
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