Chatting with Bots: AI, Speech Acts, and the Edge of Assertion

Abstract

This paper addresses the question of whether large language model-powered chatbots are capable of assertion. According to what we call the Thesis of Chatbot Assertion (TCA), chatbots are the kinds of things that can assert, and at least some of the output produced by current-generation chatbots qualifies as assertion. We provide some motivation for TCA, arguing that it ought to be taken seriously and not simply dismissed. We also review recent objections to TCA, arguing that these objections are weighty. We thus confront the following dilemma: how can we do justice to both the considerations for and against TCA? We consider two influential responses to this dilemma - the first appeals to the notion of proxy-assertion; the second appeals to fictionalism - and argue that neither is satisfactory. Instead, reflecting on the ontogenesis of assertion, we argue that we need to make space for a category of proto-assertion. We then apply the category of proto-assertion to chatbots, arguing that treating chatbots as proto-assertors provides a satisfactory resolution to the dilemma of chatbot assertion.

References in corpus (10)

• Evaluating Large Language Models in Theory of Mind Tasks
• Making AI Intelligible: Philosophical Foundations
• From task structures to world models: What do LLMs know?
• Large Language Models Fail on Trivial Alterations to Theory-of-Mind Tasks
• Emergent World Representations: Exploring a Sequence Model Trained on a Synthetic Task
• Clever Hans or Neural Theory of Mind? Stress Testing Social Reasoning in Large Language Models
• Still No Lie Detector for Language Models: Probing Empirical and Conceptual Roadblocks
• The Geometry of Truth: Emergent Linear Structure in Large Language Model Representations of True/False Datasets
• Standards for Belief Representations in LLMs
• Operationalising Representation in Natural Language Processing