Assignment 1 (NO AI USE FOR THIS ASSiGNMENT)
Look at the following questions and think about them while reading or watching your assigned fiction.(https://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/maelzel.htm )
Then write up the answers to these questions (probably about a paragraph each) and submit the answers as a file.
Make sure that you provide enough information so that the students giving feedback can understand what you are saying, even though they have probably not read or watched your assigned fiction. Make sure that you indicate which paragraph is an answer to which question.
What is the name of your fiction? What year is it from? Give a brief (3-4 sentence) summary of whatever overview of the fiction will help someone understand your answers to the other questions.
Does the “artificially intelligent” being in your fiction appear to be a general-purpose artificial intelligence (AGI) or a special-purpose one? If it is special-purpose, does it appear to identify/classify, recommend, do, or generate? It might not be totally clear from the story, or some of the characters may believe something false about it. Please include a few sentences explaining this if you think there’s something to explain.
Does the “artificially intelligent” being in your story appear to be embodied or disembodied?
Does this embodiment or disembodiment affect anything that it does in the story – could it equally well have worked the other way?
Does the “artificially intelligent” being in your story appear to be agentic AI or tool AI?
Does it have goals and interests of its own that it pursues with agency, or does it primarily react to the commands of others? Are there any changes in its level of agency through the story, or do any characters importantly mis-perceive it? Does the agency or lack thereof affect the story – would the story work just as well as a story if it had been the other way?
Does the “artificially intelligent” being in your story appear to be a symbolic system, that is intelligently programmed in order to follow specific instructions, or does it appear to be a neural net, that has been given some sort of training data and figured out what to do on its own? It may not be clear from the story what the source of its intelligence here, but you should write down something about what we might know, or the characters might believe.
Assignment 2
Read the full instructions for this assignment before starting.
Do the following with each of Gemini (the LLM from Google), Claude (the LLM from Anthropic), and ChatGPT (the LLM from OpenAI).
Start a new chat (to ensure that past history doesn’t get included.) If you are logged in to a paid account, ensure that you are using the default model (ChatGPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 1.5 Flash)
Ask what it knows about your Assigned Fiction https://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/maelzel.htm. Assuming it knows about this work (it probably does – but if it doesn’t, that’s interesting) ask it some version of Questions 2, 3, 4, and 5 from the previous assignment(reprinted below). If it gave answers to any of the questions that are significantly different from yours (or the other LLMs), briefly discuss the reasons and see if you can come to an agreement.
When you are done, copy the record of the conversation and paste into a file, and submit it here. (It could be all three in a single file, or three separate files.) Make clear which conversation is from which LLM.
Reminder of questions from previous assignment:
What is the name of your fiction? What year is it from? Give a brief (3-4 sentence) summary of whatever overview of the fiction will help someone understand your answers to the other questions.
Does the “artificially intelligent” being in your fiction appear to be a general-purpose artificial intelligence (AGI) or a special-purpose one? If it is special-purpose, does it appear to identify/classify, recommend, do, or generate? It might not be totally clear from the story, or some of the characters may believe something false about it. Please include a few sentences explaining this if you think there’s something to explain.
Does the “artificially intelligent” being in your story appear to be embodied or disembodied? Does this embodiment or disembodiment affect anything that it does in the story – could it equally well have worked the other way?
Does the “artificially intelligent” being in your story appear to be agentic AI or tool AI?
Does it have goals and interests of its own that it pursues with agency, or does it primarily react to the commands of others? Are there any changes in its level of agency through the story, or do any characters importantly mis-perceive it? Does the agency or lack thereof affect the story – would the story work just as well as a story if it had been the other way?
Does the “artificially intelligent” being in your story appear to be a symbolic system, that is intelligently programmed in order to follow specific instructions, or does it appear to be a neural net, that has been given some sort of training data and figured out what to do on its own? It may not be clear from the story what the source of its intelligence here, but you should write down something about what we might know, or the characters might believe.
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