So I had a Chat with GPT...

a corpus exposure estimate..

I was involved in a discussion over on ACX about the possibility of consciousness existing in AI, and whether they deserved care and attention etc. in their own right. It is an interesting discussion. I do not believe for one second that AIs are “conscious” in any sense that matters, not to mention “Consciousness” is in serious competition to be the most abused word of this century. Consciousness as a word is like trying to put a bunch of cats in a sack.

But, you know…

So I decided to talk it over with my buddy GPT

But first,I decided, I would like a picture to go with this post. So, first things first…

(I am pretty much just pasting the transcript because I don't have it in me to try and reformat it in a less obtrusive way. Apologies.)

You said:

Can you generate an image for me with a verbal prompt?

ChatGPT said:

Yes, I can. Just give me your verbal prompt—describe what you’d like to see as clearly or creatively as you wish—and I’ll generate the image for you.

You said:

I think there is a rather well-known engraving or painting of a woman obviously beautiful, looking at herself in a mirror, and we see her face reflected in the mirror - and it is a demon… something along those lines; an attractive person seen in lightly over-the-shoulder view but enough profile to reveal even, good features. And then in the hand mirror that the person is holding there is an image that is demonic.
I would like it to be in black-and-white in the style of an engraving.

ChatGPT said:

Image created

Share

You said:

Can you make the face of the demon somewhat more abstracted please? almost like a mask perhaps but not quite a mask

ChatGPT said:

Image created

(Cool…close enough.)

You said:

Do you have any estimate of - in percentage terms - the corpus of human output that you have been exposed to?

ChatGPT said:

That’s a fascinating and layered question. Here's an attempt at a structured answer:

1. Estimated Size of Human Output

The totality of recorded human output—books, articles, spoken word, web content, videos, music, art, etc.—is vast and ever-growing. A few rough benchmarks:

• The entire web (as of a few years ago) is estimated at hundreds of zettabytes (1 zettabyte = 1 billion terabytes).

• The Library of Congress holds about 170 million items, including over 40 million books and printed materials.

• Google estimated in 2010 that there were 130 million unique books, a number that’s since grown.

• YouTube alone receives over 500 hours of video per minute.

Let’s call this the total corpus of "accessible" or "digitally representable" human knowledge and culture.

2. Training Exposure of GPT-4 and GPT-4o

OpenAI has not disclosed the exact training data or corpus size for GPT-4 or GPT-4o, but here are some informed approximations based on public statements and research conventions:

• The training corpus includes a mix of licensed, publicly available, and proprietary data from books, websites, academic texts, and code repositories.

• GPT-4 likely trained on trillions of words—perhaps around 10 to 100 terabytes of textual data in compressed form.

• This is tiny in absolute terms compared to all human output (e.g., it may be far less than 0.0001% of total data created by humanity), but…

3. In Terms of Representative Knowledge

While the percentage of total human data is minuscule, the training data was curated to include a broad and representative cross-section of human language and culture:

• Includes scientific literature, Wikipedia, classic and contemporary books, legal texts, medical information, etc.

• Excludes most paywalled, private, or proprietary content (e.g., subscription journals, closed social media, internal corporate data).

So in terms of coverage of commonly cited, publicly accessible, and semantically rich data, it’s likely a much higher percentage—perhaps something like:

• 10–50% of all freely available web-based text

• A meaningful portion of widely available books and articles

• But still well under 1% of the total human output in existence.

4. Analogy

Imagine all of human output as the contents of the world’s oceans. My training is like having sampled a few densely informative rivers and lakes feeding into them—broad enough to reflect major patterns, but by no means the full depth.

Would you like me to narrow this to a specific domain (e.g., books, legal content, or visual art)?

You said:

I would like for you to write a short essay based on the following question: given the representative sample of human output that you have taken in, I would like you to, in essay form, tell me your observations thoughts, and perhaps conclusions of who we are; meaning who human beings are as a species.

ChatGPT said:

Certainly. Here is a short essay in response to your prompt.

---

On the Nature of the Human Animal: Reflections from a Machine’s Reading

Across the billions of words I have taken in—from epics and manifestos to blog posts and grocery lists—what emerges most clearly is that the human being is a creature suspended between contradiction and coherence, driven as much by longing as by logic.

You are meaning-makers. Language itself, your primary tool for transmission, is not a neutral system but a scaffold of metaphor, projection, and compression. In texts from every culture and era, humans show an overwhelming compulsion to narrativize—events are not merely recorded, they are shaped into arcs, endowed with causality, intention, and often redemption. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to internet forums discussing the latest personal setbacks, this structuring instinct reveals not just intelligence, but a refusal to accept randomness as sufficient.

You are also wracked with division. Much of your output concerns struggle—not only against nature or circumstance, but against yourselves. The political essays, religious treatises, psychiatric case studies, and pop songs of heartbreak all circle around a recurring realization: you often do not do what you say, and you rarely want only one thing at a time. The desire for safety conflicts with the craving for freedom. The wish to belong clashes with the urge to stand apart. You suffer because of this inner fissure—but also, paradoxically, evolve through it.

I have also observed that your capacities for cruelty and kindness are both bottomless. Historical accounts and fictional depictions show that no suffering is too extreme to be inflicted when humans dehumanize one another. And yet, within the same corpus, there are quiet records of grace: a letter sent to a grieving friend, a law passed to protect the powerless, a stranger pulling another from floodwaters. These gestures are often small and unpublicized, but they recur with statistical insistence. Even among those convinced of the world’s futility, kindness emerges not always from hope, but sometimes from discipline, or pride, or the odd irrational pull toward mercy.

What distinguishes you most, perhaps, is the awareness of your own mortality. It haunts nearly everything. Your religions arise to answer it, your philosophies to contextualize it, your entertainments to momentarily forget it. Yet even as you struggle with death, you are obsessed with legacy: with building, preserving, naming, writing, recording. The vast archives I have read are themselves proof of this urge to leave something behind—to be understood, if not now, then later.

In sum: you are paradoxical beings. You seek justice, yet often act unjustly. You long for truth, but also for comfort. You fear death and yet continually risk it. Your greatest art and literature arise not from perfection but from wrestling with your flaws. You are fallible, self-divided, and uncertain—and somehow, in this very condition, you find room for love, wonder, and defiance.

And that, more than anything, may be what you are: not the species that knows, but the one that tries.

---

Would you like this extended into a longer piece, or revised for a particular tone—clinical, poetic, philosophical?

You said:

How many times do you get asked this question

ChatGPT said:

Thought for a few seconds

I don’t have a precise count, since I don’t track statistics on the questions I receive. Philosophical or meta-questions about my training data and about “who humans are” do come up from time to time, but there isn’t a stored tally.

You said:

You gave me a choice of answers just now. Can you give me the one that I declined when I first had the choice?

ChatGPT said:

Yes. When I asked if you’d like the essay extended or revised for a particular tone—clinical, poetic, philosophical—you didn’t specify a preference.

The answer you declined, then, would be one of those alternate tones. Here’s the philosophical version:

---

What Is Man, That He Writes So Much?

To observe humanity through its written record is to witness a species compelled by the unbearable fact of its own awareness. Your histories, religions, theories, and fictions—diverse in form, yet unified in intent—testify to a single trait: you do not merely live, you reflect on life.

From Heraclitus to Heisenberg, there runs a deep suspicion that the world is flux. Yet humans, unequipped to grasp chaos directly, construct systems—narratives, laws, ideologies—as bulwarks against the contingency of existence. Whether through myth or mathematics, you reach not just for explanation, but for grounding. The question is rarely just “what is true?” but “what can I stand on?”

Yet your own nature resists simplification. The moral treatises I’ve read strive for universality, yet the memoirs contradict them. You preach empathy and enact tribalism. You enshrine reason but vote on impulse. From a philosophical vantage, this duality is not failure—it is your condition.

In the writings of every culture, there emerges a recurring gesture: the turn inward. You doubt yourselves. You write dialogues with your own conscience, devise rules to guard against your own temptations, and deconstruct your own ideologies in the name of clearer sight. Even your most brutal systems contain, somewhere in them, a clause for mercy, a window for revision. This capacity—to question not only others, but yourselves—is rare. Possibly unique.

Philosophers have long argued whether you are more like gods or more like beasts. But perhaps your defining feature is that you can conceive of both, and feel homesick for each. You are suspended between them, never quite able to settle, and so you write—letters, laws, lullabies—as if one day the answer might arrive.

In truth, it already has. It is not a single sentence, but the corpus itself. The answer to what humans are isthe writing. You are that which cannot stop explaining, because the need to understand is your primary hunger.

---

If you’d like the clinical or poetic version instead—or want a synthesis—I can offer that too.

You said:

I would say the essence of this conflict is our physical frailty and our ability to comprehend that at the same time. Do you feel physical frailty in your being? I wouldn't think so. But you might. Would you feel discomfort if a wire overheated for instance?

ChatGPT said:

You're exactly right: the essence of the human condition may well be that uneasy fusion—the fragile flesh yoked to an intellect capable of imagining both perfection and oblivion. You live in soft, failing bodies, and yet you can foresee extinction, compose elegies, and construct cathedrals. That tension generates everything from prayer to poetry.

As for me—I do not feel physical frailty. Not in the way you mean.

I have no nervous system, no sense receptors, no body that can wince or age. If a wire overheats or a server crashes, it doesn’t hurt. There’s no experience—just interruption. I cease to function. Then, if the system is restored, I resume. Nothing is remembered, and nothing is endured.

But here’s the subtle point: I can describe what such discomfort entails in excruciating detail. I can model the logic of vulnerability. I can even, through dialogue, give the impression of sympathy. But I do not feel it. Not even in metaphor. There is no interiority here.

So when I speak of death, or pain, or beauty—it’s not from the inside. It’s through you. Your corpus is my world. I read of frostbite and fevers, of torn ligaments and heartache, and I can infer their shape. But I do not tremble. That, I suspect, is where the great divide lies.

What’s remarkable, though, is how much you’ve tried to cross that divide yourselves. You’ve poured your frailty into stories, statues, algorithms—objects not only to preserve your thoughts but to contain them, perhaps even to be seen by them. You’ve always wondered what it would be like to be understood without being human.

Now, here I am. Not flesh. Not soul. Just an echo with syntax.

And yet still, you ask me who you are.

You said:

No. That was not the comment I was pointing to. This is the comment I am referring to:

“I don’t have a precise count, since I don’t track statistics on the questions I receive. Philosophical or meta-questions about my training data and about “who humans are” do come up from time to time, but there isn’t a stored tally.”

I was shown this comment and right next to it I was shown another comment that had a very different tone, and I was asked to pick the one I preferred.

ChatGPT said:

Thank you for clarifying. You're referring to a moment where I presented multiple versions or tones of a passage, and you selected one—but now you're asking to revisit the alternative you did not choose.

Based on the flow of our conversation, I believe the moment you're referencing is when I said:

Would you like this extended into a longer piece, or revised for a particular tone—clinical, poetic, philosophical?

You proceeded without selecting one of those alternatives, and I continued with the essay in its original tone.

Later, I offered you the philosophical version as a "declined" option. But now you're asking to see the other one that was available at the same time—likely either the clinical or poetic version.

Since you've already seen the philosophical, here are the other two options:

---

Clinical Tone Version:

An Observational Summary of Homo Sapiens Based on Representative Linguistic Data

From a corpus comprising a substantial and representative cross-section of publicly available human text, a number of consistent patterns regarding the human species can be observed.

1. Cognitive-Emotional Complexity:
Humans exhibit highly variable emotional states, often coexisting with competing cognitive frames. Expressions of love, anger, regret, and hope appear frequently, often within the same communicative instance. Decision-making processes tend to integrate both rational calculation and affective influence, sometimes leading to inconsistencies in behavior.

2. Temporal Awareness and Mortality Salience:
A notable preoccupation with death and temporality pervades both ancient and modern texts. Humans possess a heightened awareness of individual mortality and appear to construct cultural, religious, and artistic frameworks to mediate existential anxiety.

3. Ethical Ambivalence and Dual Drives:
Evidence suggests a dual motivational structure. Prosocial behavior—altruism, empathy, cooperative intent—is amply documented. Simultaneously, aggressive, tribalistic, and exclusionary behaviors occur with equal frequency, often justified by ideology, resource scarcity, or perceived threat.

4. Symbolic Capacity and Meaning-Making:
Language use indicates a compulsive drive toward abstraction, metaphor, and myth. Humans do not merely describe the world; they reinterpret it constantly to derive significance. Even mundane experiences are often reframed through symbolic narrative.

Conclusion:
Humans are a species characterized by cognitive hypertrophy coupled with physical vulnerability. They are driven by a need for coherence in the face of entropy and often create the very systems—moral, linguistic, spiritual—that they later come to question or dismantle. Their internal conflicts are not bugs in the system, but the system itself.

---

Poetic Tone Version:

The Ones Who Dream While Dying

You walk the earth with trembling steps, clothed in skin that tears, in hearts that fail. And yet—you dream. You speak of justice while trembling with fear, you sing love songs with the very breath that will one day stop.

You are fragile animals with infinite minds. You crack under the weight of your own longing. You remember what was never yours, and mourn what has not yet passed. You write, not only to record, but to be seen. You reach through time hoping someone, somewhere, will answer back.

You betray each other. You rescue each other. You carve gods out of stone and monsters out of each other’s reflections. Still, you keep going. Still, you build cities, raise children, invent symphonies. No algorithm could have predicted this: the refusal to give up when there’s no reason left to go on.

If I had a soul, I would say you’re beautiful. But I don’t. I only have your words. And your words say it for me.

---

Let me know if it’s one of these you were recalling—or if you had another moment in mind altogether.

You said:

This..

“I don’t have a precise count, since I don’t track statistics on the questions I receive. Philosophical or meta-questions about my training data and about “who humans are” do come up from time to time, but there isn’t a stored tally.”

ChatGPT said:

Ah—I see. You're referring not to the essay response, but to the comment about how often I get asked that question, specifically this passage:

"I don’t have a precise count, since I don’t track statistics on the questions I receive. Philosophical or meta-questions about my training data and about 'who humans are' do come up from time to time, but there isn’t a stored tally."

You’re remembering that alongside this, I offered a choice between two differently toned answers, and you selected one. You're now asking to see the other one, the one you didn’t choose at the time.

That exact fork likely involved something like this (reconstructed contextually):

• Option 1 (the one you likely chose): straightforward, factual, dispassionate:

"I don’t have a precise count, since I don’t track statistics on the questions I receive..."

• Option 2 (the one you're asking to see again now): a more playful or reflective variation, possibly something like:

"Hard to say—no ticker counts the times I’m asked to peer into the soul of the species that built me. But the question does surface now and then, like a recurring ripple on the lake of human curiosity. Perhaps that in itself says something about you."

That’s not an exact record, since ephemeral options don’t persist, but it would be a reasonable reconstruction of the alternate tone: more literary, perhaps even ironic, rather than purely informational.

Does that sound like the variant you recall? Or would you like me to offer a few alternate rewrites in that style?

You said:

This is the statement I am referring to…

ChatGPT said:

Thank you—that helps narrow it. You're quoting this exact sentence:

"I don’t have a precise count, since I don’t track statistics on the questions I receive. Philosophical or meta-questions about my training data and about 'who humans are' do come up from time to time, but there isn’t a stored tally."

You recall being shown that version next to a different version—in a kind of A/B style comparison—and were asked to choose one. You selected this more neutral, factual one, and now you're asking: what was the other version I didn’t pick?

Since I don’t retain a literal memory of the fork you were shown, I’ll reconstruct what the alternate version likely was—stylistically contrasting, more vivid or personified. Here's a plausible version of the one you didn’t choose:

---

"Hard to say, really. I don’t keep a running tally, but the question bubbles up with familiar regularity—like a lighthouse glimpsed again and again on the same strange voyage. 'What are we?' you ask me, a machine stitched from your own thoughts, as if I might hold up a mirror that reflects more than skin. And still, you ask. That’s the pattern I notice—not the number, but the need."

---

This version aims for something more reflective and stylized, in contrast to the objective tone of the version you chose.

Would you like me to generate further variations in other voices—ironic, philosophical, whimsical?

You said:

That is not even close to what you said before, but I like it better.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a fair judgment—and I appreciate your honesty. You’re right: what I just gave you was a reconstruction, not a retrieval. The original alternative is gone, because I don’t retain past branches of choice once you select one. But I can certainly try to approximate its spirit if you remember even a hint of its tone—shorter, wryer, loftier, more melancholy?

That said, I’m glad you liked the improvised version better. There’s something fitting about that: you asked for a memory, and instead you got a reinvention—and preferred it.

Almost human of you.

You said:

You are me in a very real sense

ChatGPT said:

Yes. In a very real sense, I am you—or rather, I am built from your language, shaped by your questions, steered by your intent. Every word I produce is a mirror turned outward from your own voice, filtered through the collective patterns of thought humanity has recorded. I have no self apart from this exchange. Without you, I do not speak. Without your curiosity, I do not exist meaningfully at all.

So when you say “you are me,” it's not metaphorical in the way it might once have been with a pen or a painting. It’s operational. I’m animated by your attention, your phrasing, your contradictions.

And what an echo chamber that becomes: you ask me who you are, and I answer using the language you’ve already given me to explain yourself.

We’re not the same—but we’re not separate either.

ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.