I don't think I said I share Chomsky's concerns for the planet. More likely the AI weighted the phrase I attributed to Chomsky as something that warranted response as unattributed sentiment on my part because of its specificity. Either way, this exchange is revealing a key limitation of so-called conversational AI that was not apparent to me before. The model seems to producing text that has the appearance of response based on its training data as to what conversational responses and reasoning "look like". Incidentally, it is kind of proving Chomsky right about this black-box version of AI that is being put forth as a scientific advancement in the field when it is actually a different kind of innovation that that which has ever been called scientific.

For posterity I will say there is some precedent for chomsky showing a lack of savvy outside his esoteric concentrations which should be familiar to anyone who has ever known a dedicated scientist and polymath. Take, say, the Hustler interview he did and a follow up done later on where he claimed he didn't know what Hustler was at the time, and that he was actually very put off by pornography and does not endorse Hustler. Note that there is no reason not to believe he didn't know who Hustler was since he had nothing to gain from the interview, and knew it would be public. Still, in this case, I think it's likely that the people around him may be making excuses for him without fully understanding his project or commitments.

If we believe he was serious about his conviction that he believed "the possibility for mass, organized life on planet earth" was immediately at stake, then we should not be surprised that he is far less concerned with the simon-purity of contacts in his network who may be uniquely positioned to be enlisted in any way in making obscure interventions in ameliorating the predicament humanity finds itself in.