Levitsky A.E.
REAL VS. VIRTUAL: VIEWED BY HUMAN AND ARTIFICIAL MINDS
Abstract. The article focuses on the definitions of real and virtual entities taken from Dictionaries of the Russian National Literary Language as well as their understanding reflected in the questionnaires filled by the native speakers of the Russian language and the Artificial intelligence generated in https://gpt-chatbot.ru/. 45 students of linguistics, who filled the questionnaire, aged 18 – 23 years old obtain their education at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Area Studies, Moscow Lomonosov State University. The article contains common and divergent features of information reflected on real and virtual worlds. The informants’ answers reveal the conspicuous variety, whereas the Artificial intelligence transfers the coaches’ point of view, which in general correlates with the Internet data. In general, the answers obtained correspond with the semantics of ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ as presented in the Dictionaries of the Russian Language. The research pinpoints the necessity of treating ‘possible’ while dealing with ‘real’ and ‘virtual’, where ‘possible’ presents itself as ‘a realized possibility’ in the first case, whist in the second case – as ‘a not realized possibility’, though retained this potency. The informants’ as well as the Artificial intelligence’s answers reveal a specific zone in between ‘real’ and ‘virual’. The above zone hosts computer games, computer programs, etc. connected with the real activity of humans as well as their involvement in the framework of the virtual world.
Keywords: Real; virtual; informants’ questionnaire; artificial intelligence; semantics.