Exposure is not how dark or how light an image looks!

I don't understand what you mean.

Are you saying your post

is on topic? 🤣

After some back and forth with chatGPT:

On first look, I am happy with that description.

It's a little strange n this context, but not incorrect, and it brings the aperture into the, ahem, picture:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrance_pupil

You know, in a general terms, it doesn't have to be camera, sensor or lens. You can expose anything on/to anything. General terms and correctness make it harder to explain and understand. There is always a reason to attack almost any word.

You caught ChatGPT on a good day. This is what chatGPT tells me (it's wrong!):
Exposure in photography refers to the amount of light that reaches the camera's sensor or film when taking a photograph. It is determined by three factors: shutter speed, aperture, and ISO sensitivity.

Well, you see - the higher you crank your ISO, the more invisible little ISO fairies pop out of your camera and start pushing and squeezing extra photons through your lens and toward the sensor. It's all perfectly sensible!

Doesn't ISO setting on the camera determines A or S in any auto modes for any given scene (lighting)?

How does one know what ISO to set?

One does not, but ISO is set to something anyway

In automatic modes, ISO guides the camera to set the proper exposure. In M mode, the human guides the camera to set the proper exposure.
You cannot say that ISO is part of exposure in A mode but not in M mode.

I'm confused ;)

Not a definition per se but, as we know, the exposure for a given scene and it's lighting is directly dependent only on the actual value of the f-number and shutter speed when the shot is taken.

Anything indirect such as ISO, EC, metering and stuff is [u]indirectly[/u] affecting exposure, not setting it.

I get better results with Google search than with either ChatGPT or Bard because I am doing the selection of results.

Autocorrect on steroids.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence)