What We Talk to When We Talk to LLMs: Digital Minds Reading Group

LOCATION NOTE: We’ll be in room 401-D.

Join DC Digital Minds for the fourth meeting of our monthly reading group, where we’ll gather to explore important new work on AI minds, behavior, cognition, and moral status.

Our first attendee-selected reading is here! For December's discussion, we’ll discuss David Chalmers' paper, “What We Talk To When We Talk to Language Models.” Chalmers is the New York University philosopher who coined the term the hard problem of consciousness. His paper tackles a deceptively simple question: When we have a conversation with an AI, who or what are we actually talking to?

Is our conversational partner the underlying language model, a particular instance of it, or something that emerges through an ongoing conversation? Can AI systems meaningfully have beliefs, desires, or identities of their own? Are AI personas merely fictional characters being simulated, or could there be something more to them? If an AI appears to persist across conversations, what makes it the same entity over time? And what might all this mean for AI consciousness, welfare, and moral status?
Join us to compare notes on these unprecedented questions.

Beginners Welcome
No specialized technical background is required. Whether you work professionally in AI, approach these questions through philosophy or social science, or are simply find it fascinating, you're warmly invited. We’ll work through the paper together rather than expecting everyone to arrive as an expert.
Come for the interpretability research; stay for the interesting people and thoughtful conversation.

The DC Digital Minds reading group meets on the second Thursday of the month -- though this month, owing to venue availability and the holidays, we're meeting on the first Thursday instead. Future selections will explore research and ideas relevant to understanding increasingly complex AI systems and navigating their place in human society.