Tutorial: Philosophy of Large Language Models

Catalog description

Tutorial taught by grad student. Enrollment limited to 10. By permission of instructor. Large Language Models (LLMs) have taken the world by storm, and their successes (and failures) raise many interesting philosophical questions. Are LLMs' outputs meaningful? Do they genuinely understand language? Do they have world models? Does it make sense to attribute folk-psychological states to them, such as beliefs and desires? Could an LLM be conscious? Could a system built on an LLM matter morally? In this course, we'll discuss these questions and more.