Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI through the Jīngāng Jīng, Gutenberg, broadsheets, radio interviews, Xeroxed mailings, and digital documents like this one, such technologies have functioned to reduce the effort required to expand the reach (in time and space) of any work made of words. Before the internet, public intellectuals were those few writers and speakers who used the varied authority of their voices and various forms of media to shape public discourse on themes of public importance beyond the daily flux: what world is this (as the recent Gorillaz lyric puts it), who are we, how did we get here, what is to be done to better our worlds, etc. In the three decades since the launch of the web browser, we have seen public discourse become more democratized through the reduction of the cost, time, and effort required to create, dis- tribute, and find words intended for public discussion. How can GPT-4’s mechanical generation of words continue internet software’s democratization of the role of public intel- lectuals, and help the work of anyone contributing to public discourse? Certainly not by automating the writing of authoritative con- tributions to public discourse—that is, not by replacing hard- earned expertise. Rather, GPT-4 provides a powerful new tool for generating new kinds of inputs to our own thinking. It gives us a rich new learning loop before we author our own contri- butions, where our prompts to GPT-4 generate outputs that themselves become new inputs—to additional GPT-4 prompts, to our own research, to our own thinking and writing. GPT-4 provides, with unprecedented speed and scale, each of us with probabilistic syntheses of the world’s existing words to consider as inputs, challenges, and inspirations for our own work. 166