Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI By the start of February 2023, OpenAI said ChatGPT had one hundred million monthly active users, making it the fast- est-growing consumer internet app ever. Along with that torrent of user interest, there were news stories of the new Bing chatbot functioning in sporadically unusual ways that were very different from how ChatGPT had generally been engaging with users—including showing “anger,” hurling insults, boast- ing on its hacking abilities and capacity for revenge, and basi- cally acting as if it were auditioning for a future episode of Real Housewives: Black Mirror Edition. Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott suggested that such behavior was “clearly part of the learning process” as more people use GPT- like tools. These incidents do raise questions that will persist as LLMs evolve. I’ll address such issues in more detail later in the book, and try to put them in what I believe is the appropri- ate context. For now, I’ll just say, “See what I mean about things moving quickly?” The “soul” of a new machine Before we get too far into this journey, I’d like to tell you more about my traveling companion, GPT-4. So far, I’ve been putting quotations around words like “knowledge,” “aware,” and “understands” when I talk about GPT-4 to signal that I, a sen- tient being, understand that GPT-4 is not one. It is essentially a very sophisticated prediction machine. While GPT-4 (and other LLMs like it) aren’t conscious, they are reaching a point where their capacity to produce appropriate generations in so many different contexts is improving so fast that they can increasingly appear to possess human-like intel- 10