Cf: Inquiry Into Inquiry • On Initiative 4 https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2023/05/15/inquiry-into-inquiry-on-initiativ… Re: Terry Tao ( https://terrytao.wordpress.com/about/ ) ::: PCAST Working Group on Generative AI Invites Public Input ( https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2023/05/13/pcast-working-group-on-generative… ) My Comment — I think a lot of people who've been working all along on AI, intelligent systems, and computational extensions of human capacities in general are a little distressed to see the field cornered and re‑branded in the short‑sighted, market‑driven way we currently see. The more fundamental problem I see here is the failure to grasp the nature of the task at hand, and this I attribute not to a program but to its developers. Journalism, Research, and Scholarship are not matters of generating probable responses to prompts or other stimuli. What matters is producing evidentiary and logical supports for statements. That is the task requirement the developers of recent LLM‑Bots are failing to grasp. There is nothing new about that failure. There is a long history of attempts to account for intelligence and indeed the workings of scientific inquiry based on the principles of associationism, behaviorism, connectionism, and theories of that order. But the relationship of empirical evidence, logical inference, and scientific information is more complex and intricate than is dreamt of in those reductive philosophies. Regards, Jon