This Week's Inquirer: What does ChatGPT mean for grammar, cyberbullying, and the future of language?

Will a bot always reply with perfect grammar? If they do, will that make us better, or will it make us dumber, in the same way that GPS has destroyed my sense of direction? An expert explains.

We already know the machines are going to win. Is that a good thing — grammatically speaking?

In our brave new AI world, chatbots can do things ranging from highly trivial (like giving you detailed medical diagnoses) to deadly serious (you can converse with Gritty). They use algorithms to predict which word should come next, like your phone might do when you’re typing a text message … only turbocharged.

Which begs the question: What are the grammatical implications of chatbots? For instance, if I (or more likely, you, because I mean really …) ask a chatbot an ungrammatical question (“Is our children learning?”), can it make sense of your query like a human might?

Will a bot always reply with perfect grammar? If they do, will that make us better, because we always have a well-written example to point to, or will it make us dumber, in the same way that GPS has destroyed my sense of direction? On the other hand, if machines learn bad grammar from bad inputs, will they respond with bad grammar, thus making our problems even worse?

Read the full column at Inquirer.com.