Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI Of course the key word here remains seems. GPT-4 is no more conscious than its predecessors; it’s just better at making pre- dictions. Again, I want to make the point that GPT-4’s often-re- markable simulations of cognitive proficiency are just that: simulations. GPT-4 is not a conscious, self-aware, sentient AI entity, a la Forbidden Planet’s Robby the Robot or Star Trek’s Data. And yet I also want to again make the point that—whoa, even GPT-4’s ability to simulate such a contextually-aware human- like consciousness is a pretty big deal. Why do I think this? A recent critical essay that award-winning science fiction writer Ted Chiang published in the New Yorker helped me articulate why. “Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web,” Chiang writes. “It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation.” In Chiang’s view, the inexact representation of the information that comprises ChatGPT (and presumably similar LLMs like GPT-4) is what leads to both their synthetic powers and their tendency toward hallucinations and other errors. As “JPEG[s] of all the text on the Web,” they can synthesize information in novel ways because they have access to all this information at once. That allows them to take what they know about one thing, and then also what they know about something else, and con- vincingly mash them up into a new thing. 16