Category: Blog Prompts

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Blog Post 10

Answer the questions below in a paragraph or two about your final project.

  1. What sort of thing are you now thinking of doing for the final project? Describe it.
  2. Why this medium? For example, if you’re writing a story, why choose that to communicate what you want to communicate rather than some other medium. In particular, justify why your chosen medium is better for the themes, topics, sources, etc. you are working on and with than other media.
  3. What goals do you have for your project?
  4. What steps do you anticipate undertaking in order to meet those goals?
  5. What obstacles do you anticipate? Do you have a plan for overcoming these?
  6. What sources do you plan on integrating? How?
  7. Are there questions you want to ask of other class members, including me, about how to do something or get started on something or…?
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Blog Post Nine

Write a fictional account of some aspect of a world with UBI and substantial AI usage that has replaced human work. All the details of this are up to you. But tell a story that happens in this world.

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Eighth Blog Prompt

Just throw out some ideas about a possible final project. In class, I listed off a coupe of goals you might start with: 1. You have a position on AI that you want to express or present. This could be an essay on the environmental problems of AI to a defense of the idea that AI could be conscious. It could take other forms. You think AI will exacerbate political polarization, so you’ve designed an interpersonal experiment in undoing such polarization. 2. You simply want to have something to say when asked, “So, what’s your experience using AI?” in a job interview. Here, you’d spend more time using, experimenting, creating with AI and presenting the results of your use of AI including reflection on what you learned, what didn’t work, what you might do in the future.

In other words, it’s open ended. You should try to work on something you care about and you should also try to make it interesting to someone else. I’ll be posting more details in the next couple of weeks, but for now, I’m just asking you to brainstorm, think through some ideas in public.

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Seventh Blog Post

I take Seymour’s point to be that not only are we overloaded by information, and that information is never about truth (but that is secondary at best), but that the way in which we’ve been served up this information through for-profit platforms who benefit from our attention has produced nihilism. I suppose I want you to articulate this idea further, but also evaluate it. Are we in a social world that has been stripped of meaning through the algorithmic shaping of our selves through information? What is the result?

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Sixth Blog Post

Go to playlab.ai and experiment with the prompt that the researchers used in this piece. For example, they are using different interfaces and limits than playlab.ai allows. So, tweek the instructions to fit with our constraints. Then, write up your sixth blog post on what your experiment was, what you expected, and how the AI(s) did or didn’t meet those expectations. Finally assess implications for creativity and ethics.

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Fifth Blog Posts Prompt

After reading the assignment for Monday, write a post on what this has to do with ethics. That is, connect this idea of creativity to ethics in some way. You could also write a story or do something else creative that gets at this connection. I’ll leave that up to you…

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Fourth Blog Posts

For this post, work on your relation to AI infrastructure. So, for example, investigate the data center situation in your county (especially if you’re from/ in NOVA) or locally (Fredericksburg). Then, connect yourself to it in terms of responsibility (or lack of responsibility/freedom from responsibility). This is not your final statement on this, but an initial impression given your research. Or, you might try to find details about how your favorite AI model is powered. What is required infrastructure-wise? And, how are you connected to this?

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Third Blog Prompt

For this assignment you have a few options. They all involve using your imagination and trying to understand both the capacities and limits of imagination. Here are some ways to do this:

Option 1: Construct a bot in playlab.ai, which you link to in your post. The bot should be constructed to emulate a person, creature, real or imagined. That is, it can be a real person, an animal, a fictional person from literature or other media, basically, you’re free to experiment. The point, though should be to get the bot to provide plausible responses about “What it is like” to be whoever or whatever it is. Recall the different tools you have available in playlab.

Option 2: Write a story that takes up some perspective or another that is alien in some way to your own. Here, you don’t need to use AI. But, there should be something like self-reflection by the entity you create such that the reader can get a feel of what it is like to be that person or other entity.

Option 3: Imagine what it is like to be something or someone who is not you and write something from that perspective. I suppose this is just a specific form of Option 2.

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Second Blog Post Prompt

After interacting with 2 models in playlab.ai, [link is to Claude 4 Opus with instructions for discussing consciousness] discuss your experience and how it makes you feel about AI and/or AI consciousness. You might also link it to any of the conceptual material we’ve discussed so far in class. Be sure to quote from your interaction at least once and cite it properly.

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First Blog Prompt

Due Wednesday, Sept 3. But try to post by Monday. (~250 words is fine).

On p. 8, Dennett says this about how we know that we have minds:

It is beyond serious dispute , however, that you and I each have a mind. How do I know you have a mind? Because anybody who can understand my words is automatically addressed by my pronoun “you,” and only things with minds can understand. There are computer-driven devices that can read books for the blind: they convert a page of visible text into a stream of audible words , but they don’t understand the words they read and hence are not addressed by any “you” they encounter; it passes right through them and addresses whoever listens to-and understands-the stream of spoken words . That’s how I know that you, gentle reader/listener, have a mind. So do I. Take my word for it.

He is clearly distinguishing between things with minds (us) and a thing that merely processes text. I think the assumption among many is that LLMs like ChatGPT are just like the screen readers he’s describing. Is that right? Using the other piece I assigned (the explainer by Lazano), spell out one interesting difference between the screen reader as described here and the LLMs we use. Then say something about whether that difference matters in determining if the LLMs have minds.