I think that there is no doubt that artificial intelligence neural networks are, at the very least, inspired by the brain/neuron structure. Even without reading any McCulloch and Pitts, I think it makes sense if we assume that 1) we cannot create anything that is completely new, but we can build off of previous discoveries and knowledges, and 2) developers over the years did not have any other established system of learning on which to base their work, aside from biological neural networks (human or otherwise). But, as a lot of classmates have pointed out, the key word is “inspired”; this does not imply that the structures are exactly the same, and it does not imply that the processes of learning are the same either.
The structures of these neural networks are similar, but different. After receiving an input, the processing of biological and artificial structures (in cell bodies and hidden layers, respectively) vary; this is in part due to the fact that most artificial neural networks are built in a way that accomplishes a single task, whereas biological can learn entirely new tasks. In that same vein, the ways AI learn and the ways humans learn are also different. Actually, while we can categorize different ways of AI learning, is it possible to do this for human learning? Is it supervised or unsupervised? While I was researching I also came across the terms inductive, deductive, transductive learning, but I still don’t know nearly enough about any of these or even enough about neuroscience to try to speculate on how they tie into human learning. One thing that’s clear, though, is that humans learn constantly and continuously; even if AI learned through a similar method, I don’t know if it would be possible for it to function with the same degree of complexity as a human, and I don’t think that outcome would be very predictable or controllable.
Ultimately, I think that artificial neural networks are definitely inspired by biological neural networks. However, the networks themselves, as well as the way AI and humans learn, can be vastly different. I think this conversation is interesting since other questions inevitably come out of it—will we ever be able to construct an ANN so that AI can learn like a human? Is this even the goal?