Importance of critical thinking to understand ChatGPT

A point of criticism raised by [1] seems to be about the term “understanding”. The authors note that ChatGPT does not have the capacity for self-awareness or cognition nor is ChatGPT conscious in any form. Furthermore, the authors point out that ChatGPT is based on predictions and not understanding. In our opinion this is correct and none argued otherwise. In fact, the term “understand” occurs only once in [3], namely in the title, stated as a question - with a question mark at the end. Also the study in [2] does not aim to go beyond the predictive ability of ChatGPT.

Furthermore, the authors write [1]: “The authors interpret the language model’s performance as indicative of an “understanding” of genetics.” This statement is not correct, instead we wrote [3]: “This creative usage allowed to show that in comparison to a heterogeneous group of humans with an uncontrolled background, ChatGPT performed similarly with an overall accuracy of almost 70%.” The important words here are “performed” and “accuracy”, both refer to a statistical evaluation of the analysis rather than any cognition-related term mentioned above.