I read the series of New York Times articles, which revealed a lot to me that I didn't know about the details of how AI operates. I find it interesting how we choose to draw a distinction between AI and humans on the basis that we are sentient and conscious whereas AI just creates formulas based off of information. I thought, for example, about how a baby learns a language. We are all English speakers, and for many of us English is our first language- it is intuitive and makes sense to us. However when we were young, the way we learned to speak was just by digesting information. We would hear our parents make certain sounds, and based on the recurring contexts we heard those sounds, we came to understand that they were words meant to be used to describe certain objects or convey certain notions, like a greeting or gratitude. From this perspective, the biggest differences between us and a model like Chat GPT are 1. That Chat can digest a lot more information in a shorter period of time 2. That it doesn't have lapses of memory the way humans do and 3. That it is a model specifically meant for language, whereas a human is a physical being with a wider range of capabilities. I acknowledge that there are a lot of counter arguments to this line of logic and I'm not necessarily rejecting the idea that AI is non-sentient, however I do think we need to take a step back and consider exactly how we are defining what it means to be sentient/conscious when we have this conversation. Going off of that, I read this https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-transcript.html additional article that was referenced by several of the NYT articles we were assigned. The article outlines a conversation between Google's Bing Chatbot and a NYT reporter, in which the Chatbot gradually started to display somewhat human-like traits. However, the article argues that this is not actually a sign of human intelligence, only a capacity to mimic it based on the way the formula predicts what the most likely next word in any given sentence can be. While I am no expert, I am slightly skeptical of this idea that AI cannot be conscious just because of the way it is structured- I wonder if there are not actually more similarities between human neurons and the artificial neural networks used to program chat bots than we assume.

This is a fascinating response, Gary. I think any of us who are active on a social media platform like Instagram are familiar with loads of graphs and charts that have to do with climate change, and while they are not all necessarily "lying" to us, a lot of them definitely display stats and information out of context, and this can perpetuate beliefs throughout the young population that are actually a bit irrational or poorly founded. It is important that all citizens who are interested in the future of our earth and in climate change be careful to fact check any information they receive in social media posts online; and perhaps there is also an argument that social media platforms should begin to restrict or censor posts that spread misinformation, via the same (or equivalent) logic to why you cannot yell "fire" in a crowded theater e.g. causing a panic that could be harmful.