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In human students, rote memorization isn’t an indicator of genuine learning, so ChatGPT’s inability to produce exact quotes from Web pages is precisely what makes us think that it has learned something. When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.

✏️ The “understanding” we see from ChatGPT giving us essays is an illusion of it rephrasing material due to its lossy compression, triggering in us a comparison to how students rephrase things as well.
Still, it’s all an illusion.
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