Humans as natural-born cyborgs: Scrutinising AI’s narrative intelligence within the 5E cognition framework
Humans as natural-born cyborgs: Scrutinising AI’s narrative intelligence within the 5E cognition framework

Summary/Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and their ability to generate content align with both perspectives: AI as a powerful assistant and AI as a potential challenge to human cognition. However, these advancements expose the persistent limitations of AI compared to humans. One such limitation, as demonstrated by the folk narrative hypothesis (Hutto 2008), is the uniquely human ability to engage in storytelling, a fundamental and ancient mechanism for memory, information storage, identity formation, and world-making or world-disruption. The ability of AI to generate coherent texts is often mistaken for its intelligence, raising false claims about AI self-consciousness and sentience. This paper argues that human narrative intelligence as a drive for sense-making might turn imperfect AI text generation into a meaningful construct despite cognitive dissonance in the communication. By analysing the technical prompts used by ChatGPT-4 to generate narrative text and its understanding of key text production categories (coherence, fluency, complexity, etc.) within the 5E Cognition framework (Stilwell & Harman 2019), I will attempt to show how AI-generated narrative structures acquire full and meaningful interpretation when perceived by a human. The generative ability of AI which emerges in co-communication with a human cannot stand for its intelligence, since it reflects human perception and our intrinsic ability to hypothesise and engage with communication agents.

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