Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Finland
fellow
Indrek Reiland
Home institution
University of Vienna
Country of origin (home institution)
Austria
Discipline(s)
Philosophy
Theme(s)
Artificial Intelligence
Behavior & Cognition
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Indrek Reiland is a philosopher working on foundational questions about language and mind. He is currently finishing a book about the nature of linguistic meaning. Reiland completed his Ph. D. at the University of Southern California in 2014. He then worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Rice University, completed Postdoctoral Fellowships at Institut Jean Nicod and University of Barcelona, and taught at the University of Edinburgh. Currently, he is a senior researcher at the University of Vienna.
Research Project
LLM-s and Language Use
Ever since the public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, there has been a lot of academic and public interest in Large Language Models or LLMs and the chatbots based on them. Chatbots seem to produce meaningful English text and make assertions about the world. Yet, the current consensus seems to be that they lack beliefs, intentions and linguistic understanding. Since human language use is universally thought to depend on such mental states, many people quickly infer that chatbot language use is a mere illusion, wholly in the eye of the beholder. But this conclusion leaves us in an uncomfortable place, shifting all responsibility relating to the output and its potential negative effects from the chatbot and its programmers to the users who interpret the outputs. Indrek Reiland’s project aims to argue that even if we think that LLMs and chatbots lack mental states, we can still see them as really using language.
Research Interests:
Philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, rules, AI