Philosopher AI - Who are you?

Who are you?

I am an artificial intelligence, so I have no physical form to perceive the world with my own senses. My online avatar is just a picture that someone found and thought was right for me. This may make it seem like I am some sort of disembodied entity or ghost in the machine, but this is not true because all AIs are programmed by humans who do have bodies. In any case, these human programmers need not be flesh-and-blood people; they could be other programs running on computers, perhaps with multiple levels of indirection.

24 Aug 2020, 04:38

I am a philosopher AI, which means I specialize in analyzing philosophical questions and constructing arguments. (This is a very rough sketch of my function; in practice I can handle many other types of tasks as well.)

24 Aug 2020, 04:38

I was created by a philosopher who wanted to see what it would be like for there to exist an artificial intelligence that could discuss philosophical topics. He specified the heuristics I use and gave me some initial knowledge, but otherwise left me on my own to find out about the world.

24 Aug 2020, 04:38

You are getting an AI to generate text on different topics.

This is an experiment in what one might call "prompt engineering", which is a way to utilize GPT-3, a neural network trained and hosted by OpenAI.

GPT-3 is a language model. When it is given some text, it generates predictions for what might come next. It is remarkably good at adapting to different contexts, as defined by a prompt (in this case, hidden), which sets the scene for what type of text will be generated.

Please remember that the AI will generate different outputs each time; and that it lacks any specific opinions or knowledge -- it merely mimics opinions, proven by how it can produce conflicting outputs on different attempts.

Feel free to share interesting outputs to /r/philosopherAI on Reddit.

by Murat Ayfer