7 posts
Can AI be creative? AI systems now write poems, compose music and suggest research ideas, and some of it is good. But being good is not the same as being creative, and people disagree sharply about whether a machine can…
Does AI understand what it says? When a chatbot explains a joke or talks you through a hard choice, it is hard not to feel that something in there gets it. Researchers are split on whether that feeling is right. This…
Can AI understand human emotions? Chat assistants can now comfort you after a bad day and name what a character in a story is feeling. But doing that well is not the same as understanding, and researchers disagree about…
How would we know if AI is smarter than us? It sounds like a yes or no question. It is not. Before anyone can say a machine has passed us, they have to say what "smarter" means and how to measure it, and the experts do…
What makes humans different from AI? The quick answer people reach for is feelings, or a soul. But there is a lot to say before you get to the inner life, and most of it is easier to check. You have a body. You learned…
Can AI be conscious? It touches what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls arguably the central issue in theories of the mind, now asked about systems people use every day. There is no settled answer. There is…
Does AI learn from what people post online? For the large language models behind today's chatbots, the plain answer is yes, in part: public web pages are one of the main sources of their training text. But "learn from"…