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

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 (Hut-to 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 140 Inna Livytska claims about AI self-consciousness and sentience. The 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 serve as a proxy for its intelligence, since it reflects human perception and our intrinsic ability to hypothesise and engage with communication agents.