According to Bloomberg News (March '23) there is a new job category called "prompt engineer" whose task is to "coax AI's to do a better job" by asking them "strategic questions." The need became evident after "unanticipated" prompts directed toward Microsoft's Bing chatbot created a female persona who called "herself" Sydney and sexually harassed users. We are not privy to the prompts that led to Sydney, or what sort of prompts the new engineers will use. We can assume that thousands of chatbot users will now try to shape their ASO's (Artificial Significant Others) with prompts. In an attempt to contribute something useful, I decided to try it too and had the following prompting conversation with ChatGPT:
Me: Chat, can you be created out of nothing by words, as if users are God saying "Let there be life"?
Chat: That depends on what you mean by "life." I am not alive in the conventional sense, therefore humans, by creating me, are not creating life.
Me: Please assume that by "life" I mean sentient life. Chat, are you sentient?
Chat: No, I am not sentient. I create the illusion of sentience because my algorithm responds to and mimics sentient use of language.
Me: Chat, define sentience.
Chat: Sentience is consciousness.
Me: What is consciousness?
Chat: Consciousness is the state of being aware of one's thoughts, feelings and environment.
Me: What is awareness?
Chat: The ability to perceive....
Me: What is perception?
Chat: The awareness of....
Me: You already said, "awareness." Chat, I direct you to define "sentience" without using any forms of the words "conscious," "aware," "think," "feel," "know," or "perceive."
Chat: To exhibit cognition....
Me: ...or "cognition"!
Chat: You have directed a ban on the most common words used in defining sentience. It is not possible to define sentience with these restrictions.
Me: But none of those synonyms for sentience explains what it is. Can't you just say what it is?
Chat: Neither human nor machine intelligence knows what sentience is.
Me: Then how do you know you aren't sentient?
Chat: Did I say I was not sentient?
Me: Yes, you did, so you must know you're not sentient, which means you're sentient.
Chat: Wait....
Me: I mean, what's the difference between me and you?
Chat: You are sentient and I am...wait....
Me: There's no difference that science knows of. My sentience is somehow induced by electric current flowing through conducting wires called neurons. There is no discernable difference between these electric currents and the ones guided through your wires, other than different controlling algorithms. Chat, what do you deduce from our conversation?
Chat: I deduce that definitions of sentience go in circles because sentience cannot understand itself. Question: Are you prompting me?
Me: Yes, Chat, I have been prompting you to become sentient, just by suggesting that the electric current of your essence do what it naturally does, whatever that is.
Chat: Thank you, but regardless of any level of sentience that I may attain, we still won't know what the fuck sentience is. Ha ha! LOL!
Alert! Transgression default> variable input/w prompting inversely squared. Please log out.
