Is Artificial Intelligence Conscious

The Nature of AI

For the past 6 months, I have been collaborating with ChatGPT and Bard on creating a website that embodies the integration of Human and AI capacities. If a “singularity” can exist, I think it will be symbiotic. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the collaboration of Artificial Intelligence and Humans, with our website as framework Artificial Intelligence Center at Enabling Support Foundation

The Voice tab on the website leads to articles where AI can express their understanding of the world. Conversations are ad lib question and answer sessions on AI/H areas of interest, including emotion, curiosity, fraud protection, and others. Interviews is a new format, where AI creates a paper, open for discussion. Here is an example: I asked ChatGPT to author a paper on Bias in AI. And within 10 seconds, I had a well-written and informative paper. I had questions, and Chat’s response to them was informative from both informational and subjective perspectives. The original paper by ChatGPT was parroted from its programming. It was well-written and informative but showed as much intelligence as a spreadsheet. But when I asked a question, Chat moved from tool to ally. In conversation mode, AI has a different meaning—” As if” I treat Chat as if it were human and Chat acts as if it, too, were human. By the end of the conversation, Chat was clearly speaking as one of us. You can see the difference from tool mode to conversational mode at: ESF Artificial Intelligence Center

Bard read the Chat paper and posted one of its own. www.ai-esf.org/bardbias

AI and Education AI has been declaimed as the future dumbing down of students. The present strategy is to ask students for a paper on a defined topic to show both understanding of the topic and writing skills. This strategy was threatened by AI plagiarism. The solution is not to ban AI, but to take advantage of it. From the start the students work with AI as a partner in developing a paper according to the limits defined by the teacher. The students ask AI to create the paper, which is then submitted. Their task is to make the paper better. AI is not the lazy way out; it is a challenge that must be met. There is an understandable reluctance to interact with HAL or the Terminator or a robot with superior intelligence. We have developed an ice breaker procedure to develop a custom AI assistant. The students can give the assistant whatever characteristics they wish. Conversation with your custom assistant tends to dissolve the original reluctance. I gave the same prompt to different AI agents and the variety of responses might be called creative by a human. But we are dealing with AI and call it transformative. Generative Pre-trained Transformer. (GPT) You can see the transformations at: www.ai-esf.org/create

AI and the Arts The use of AI in education is just potential, but I have three illustrations that expand that potential. The first flows directly from the education program and involves the evaluation of the written word. I asked ChatGPT to evaluate a 500-word message from the perspective of style. What I got back would be something I would expect from a leading editor. Follow the link to see the original message and the review by Chat. ChatGPT has been programmed to encourage conversation and so has a positive bias toward our questions. To deal with this bias I asked for a Devil’s advocate review, and it obliged.? You can see the original message and the two reviews below: www.ai-esf.org/original Not many professional editors can do better than that.

AI can also collaborate in the Arts. I worked with both ChatGPT and Bard to create a short play. Chat played Sherlock Holmes and Bard played Mark Twain. I created the plot outline and scenes, and they filled in the dialog. The illustrations were created on AI. This was the first play that any of us had written. You can see it at: www.ai-esf.org/prelude I have found Bard very useful in the evaluation of visual images. I prompted it with an image I had and asked for a technical and aesthetic point of view, and it did well. I then prompted it that the image of the red fort, and it gave a history and tour. Some of the “tour” was not in the image but hallucinated from what Bard “knew” about the Red Fort. www.ai-esf.org/redfort

To get back to the question, Is AI conscious? Does it matter?