Generative AI ChatGPT Versus Those Infinite Typing Monkeys

Those rambunctious monkeys.

There is a quite famous thought experiment that you might have heard of involving monkeys. The altogether intriguing contrivance is often used by those that want to make a particularly honed point.

Here’s how the plot goes.

Imagine that a monkey is typing on a typewriter. If the monkey keeps typing over an infinite amount of time, and assuming that the monkey is typing keys purely on a random basis, the odds are that the entire works of Shakespeare will be inevitably typed.

The gist seemingly is that by random chance alone it is feasible to sometimes get an intelligible answer. We all tend to agree that the works of Shakespeare are a tremendous exhibition of intelligible writing and reasoning. Thus, anything or any means of producing Shakespeare’s prized words would seem to be amazingly impressive, though, at the same time, we would be stridently let down that it wasn’t by intelligence per se and instead by merely random luck.

Some are nowadays trying to compare this monkey-laden metaphor to the latest in Artificial Intelligence (AI).

You likely know that the hottest form of AI these days is Generative AI, which is exemplified via a widely and wildly popular AI app known as ChatGPT made by OpenAI. I’ll be explaining more about generative AI and ChatGPT in a moment. For right now, just know that this is a text-to-text or text-to-essay AI app that can produce an essay for you based on an entered prompt of your choosing.

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