The Language of Deception

Chapter 1Artificial Social Intelligence

Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI) that seeks to improve human and machine interactions by enabling machines to speak using human language. It is the science of attempting to train machines to understand, interpret, and communicate using human language in the form of natural conversation. Some computer scientists have studied NLP to improve system interfaces by allowing humans to communicate with machines using the same language(s) they already know. For others, however, NLP has been used to simulate interactions to better understand complex social concepts such as language, learning, and social psychology. In recent years, we have seen an explosion of growth in the capabilities of NLP due to the scaling up of deep-learning language models, also referred to as large language models (LLMs).

At this very moment, as you read this, LLMs are being trained in deep-learning GPU powerhouses to become sophisticated systems that establish extremely complex logical connections. These machines are equipped with learning algorithms and optimization routines to teach themselves how to complete their objectives. They are not provided any explicit instructions pertaining to accomplishing the task; instead, their learning algorithms provide a framework for teaching themselves the optimal way to accomplish their objectives.

At their simplest unit level, these models are just composed of individual statistical ...