The dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy says that an oxymoron is a combination, in the same syntactic structure, of two words or expressions with opposite meanings that give a new meaning. It has existed in English since the fifteenth century, but in Spanish we had to say contradiction in terminis, four words to express a concept that philosophers spoke in Latin with three: contradictio in terminis.

The oxymoron that is in vogue today is artificial intelligence, a term that is not new, but has become fashionable as a result of the emergence of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence program that has the ability to interact with users through natural language. He is able to understand human language and respond fairly coherently through conversation. It is trained with a huge amount of language data, so it has a great ability to understand what is being said to it and generate consistent responses in plain language. It’s basically a website that answers questions or does what you ask, as long as its results can be delivered from the screen… and you can dramatically take a test in any college or university subject and, of course, do the intellectual work of those half-hard teachers are looking for.

It doesn’t find indexed data to return it to an endless list, like traditional search engines. In addition to looking for them, he combines them, compares them and gives an answer or a solution. You may be asked to write an essay on a certain topic, to summarize a book we don’t want to read, or to improve the style of something we’re writing. The most interesting thing is his interaction with people, because he responds with a human wave and assimilates information that someone gives him when asking questions or when correcting wrong answers. It is also very good with languages, which it translates better than other translators and dictionaries that already exist on the web.

Teachers can sleep easy because ChatGPT is less intelligent than the dumbest students…

But he is less intelligent than his pet… He says anything; they make big mistakes of all kinds because they are able to connect the information that is on the Internet, but not make conclusions based on that information. Besides, it feels nothing, which is the most important input of any animal, and we are rational animals.

There is not, there is not and there cannot be intelligence that is not human. That’s why artificial intelligence is impossible, it’s just a name, an oxymoron. Only human intelligence is capable of reasoning, abstracting, assimilating and connecting concepts, making correct decisions with incomplete or obscured data, coming to logical conclusions, discovering false premises, discovering what is true and what is false. An algorithm is not intelligence, no matter how perfect it is and even if it knows how to play chess. Teachers can sleep easy because ChatGPT is less intelligent than the dumbest students; and the really smart ones will be able to use it to learn more or to kill time, just like everything else on the internet. (OR)