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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.
But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.
This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.
So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.
Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).
Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.
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I think we should start by not following this marketing speak. The sentence “AI isn’t intelligent” makes no sense. What we mean is “LLMs aren’t intelligent”.
Mind your pronouns, my dear. “We” don’t do that shit because we know better.
The idea that RAGs “extend their memory” is also complete bullshit. We literally just finally build working search engine, but instead of using a nice interface for it we only let chatbots use them.
I’m neurodivergent, I’ve been working with AI to help me learn about myself and how I think. It’s been exceptionally helpful. A human wouldn’t have been able to help me because I don’t use my senses or emotions like everyone else, and I didn’t know it… AI excels at mirroring and support, which was exactly missing from my life. I can see how this could go very wrong with certain personalities…
E: I use it to give me ideas that I then test out solo.
So, you say AI is a tool that worked well when you (a human) used it?
That sounds fucking dangerous… You really should consult a HUMAN expert about your problem, not an algorithm made to please the interlocutor…
This is very interesting… because the general saying is that AI is convincing for non experts in the field it’s speaking about. So in your specific case, you are actually saying that you aren’t an expert on yourself, therefore the AI’s assessment is convincing to you. Not trying to upset, it’s genuinely fascinating how that theory is true here as well.
I use it to give me ideas that I then test out. It’s fantastic at nudging me in the right direction, because all that it’s doing is mirroring me.
Are we twins? I do the exact same and for around a year now, I’ve also found it pretty helpful.
I did this for a few months when it was new to me, and still go to it when I am stuck pondering something about myself. I usually move on from the conversation by the next day, though, so it’s just an inner dialogue enhancer
The machinery needed for human thought is certainly a part of AI. At most you can only claim its not intelligent because intelligence is a specifically human trait.
We don’t even have a clear definition of what “intelligence” even is. Yet a lot of people art claiming that they themselves are intelligent and AI models are not.
This article is written in such a heavy ChatGPT style that it’s hard to read. Asking a question and then immediately answering it? That’s AI-speak.
Asking a question and then immediately answering it? That’s AI-speak.
HA HA HA HA. I UNDERSTOOD THAT REFERENCE. GOOD ONE. 🤖
And excessive use of em-dashes, which is the first thing I look for. He does say he uses LLMs a lot.
“…” (Unicode U+2026 Horizontal Ellipsis) instead of “…” (three full stops), and using them unnecessarily, is another thing I rarely see from humans.
Edit: Huh. Lemmy automatically changed my three fulls stops to the Unicode character. I might be wrong on this one.
Am I… AI? I do use ellipses and (what I now see is) en dashes for punctuation. Mainly because they are longer than hyphens and look better in a sentence. Em dash looks too long.
However, that’s on my phone. On a normal keyboard I use 3 periods and 2 hyphens instead.
I’ve long been an enthusiast of unpopular punctuation—the ellipsis, the em-dash, the interrobang‽
The trick to using the em-dash is not to surround it with spaces which tend to break up the text visually. So, this feels good—to me—whereas this — feels unpleasant. I learnt this approach from reading typographer Erik Spiekermann’s book, *Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works.
My language doesn’t really have hyphenated words or different dashes. It’s mostly punctuation within a sentence. As such there are almost no cases where one encounters a dash without spaces.
Edit: Huh. Lemmy automatically changed my three fulls stops to the Unicode character.
Not on my phone it didn’t. It looks as you intended it.
Hey AI helped me stick it to the insurance man the other day. I was futzing around with coverage amounts on one of the major insurance companies websites pre-renewal to try to get the best rate and it spit up a NaN renewal amount for our most expensive vehicle. It let me go through with the renewal less that $700 and now says I’m paid in full for the six month period. It’s been days now with no follow-up . . . I’m pretty sure AI snuck that one through for me.
Be careful… If you get in an accident I guaran-god-damn-tee you they will use it as an excuse not to pay out. Maybe after a lawsuit you’d see some money but at that point half of it goes to the lawyer and you’re still screwed.
In that case let’s stop calling it ai, because it isn’t and use it’s correct abbreviation: llm.
It’s means “it is”.
Kinda dumb that apostrophe s means possessive in some circumstances and then a contraction in others.
I wonder how different it’ll be in 500 years.
It’s called polymorphism. It always amuses me that engineers, software and hardware, handle complexities far beyond this every day but can’t write for beans.
Software engineer here. We often wish we can fix things we view as broken. Why is that surprising ?Also, polymorphism is a concept in computer science as well
Would you rather use the same contraction for both? Because “its” for “it is” is an even worse break from proper grammar IMO.
Proper grammar means shit all in English, unless you’re worrying for a specific style, in which you follow the grammar rules for that style.
Standard English has such a long list of weird and contradictory roles with nonsensical exceptions, that in every day English, getting your point across in communication is better than trying to follow some more arbitrary rules.
Which become even more arbitrary as English becomes more and more a melting pot of multicultural idioms and slang. Although I’m saying that as if that’s a new thing, but it does feel like a recent thing to be taught that side of English rather than just “The Queen’s(/King’s) English” as the style to strive for in writing and formal communication.
I say as long as someone can understand what you’re saying, your English is correct. If it becomes vague due to mishandling of the classic rules of English, then maybe you need to follow them a bit. I don’t have a specific science to this.
It’s “its”, not “it’s”, unless you mean “it is”, in which case it is “it’s “.
My auto correct doesn’t care.
But your brain should.
Yours didn’t and read it just fine.
Good luck. Even David Attenborrough can’t help but anthropomorphize. People will feel sorry for a picture of a dot separated from a cluster of other dots. The play by AI companies is that it’s human nature for us to want to give just about every damn thing human qualities. I’d explain more but as I write this my smoke alarm is beeping a low battery warning, and I need to go put the poor dear out of its misery.
This is the current problem with “misalignment”. It’s a real issue, but it’s not “AI lying to prevent itself from being shut off” as a lot of articles tend to anthropomorphize it. The issue is (generally speaking) it’s trying to maximize a numerical reward by providing responses to people that they find satisfactory. A legion of tech CEOs are flogging the algorithm to do just that, and as we all know, most people don’t actually want to hear the truth. They want to hear what they want to hear.
LLMs are a poor stand in for actual AI, but they are at least proficient at the actual thing they are doing. Which leads us to things like this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKCynxiV_8I
David Attenborrough is also 99 years old, so we can just let him say things at this point. Doesn’t need to make sense, just smile and nod. Lol
I’m still sad about that dot. 😥
The thing is, ai is compression of intelligence but not intelligence itself. That’s the part that confuses people. Ai is the ability to put anything describable into a compressed zip.
I think you meant compression. This is exactly how I prefer to describe it, except I also mention lossy compression for those that would understand what that means.
Lol woops I guess autocorrect got me with the compassion
Hardly surprising human brains are also extremely lossy. Way more lossy than AI. If we want to keep up our manifest exceptionalism, we’d better start definning narrower version of intelligence that isn’t going to soon have. Embodied intelligence, is NOT one of those.
I’ve never been fooled by their claims of it being intelligent.
Its basically an overly complicated series of if/then statements that try to guess the next series of inputs.
It very much isn’t and that’s extremely technically wrong on many, many levels.
Yet still one of the higher up voted comments here.
Which says a lot.
I love this resource, https://thebullshitmachines.com/ (i.e. see lesson 1)…
In a series of five- to ten-minute lessons, we will explain what these machines are, how they work, and how to thrive in a world where they are everywhere.
You will learn when these systems can save you a lot of time and effort. You will learn when they are likely to steer you wrong. And you will discover how to see through the hype to tell the difference. …
Also, Anthropic (ironically) has some nice paper(s) about the limits of “reasoning” in AI.
ChatGPT 2 was literally an Excel spreadsheet.
I guesstimate that it’s effectively a supermassive autocomplete algo that uses some TOTP-like factor to help it produce “unique” output every time.
And they’re running into issues due to increasingly ingesting AI-generated data.
Get your popcorn out! 🍿
Removed by mod
I really hate the current AI bubble but that article you linked about “chatgpt 2 was literally an Excel spreadsheet” isn’t what the article is saying at all.
Fine, *could literally be.
The thing is, because Excel is Turing Complete, you can say this about literally anything that’s capable of running on a computer.
And they’re running into issues due to increasingly ingesting AI-generated data.
There we go. Who coulda seen that coming! While that’s going to be a fun ride, at the same time companies all but mandate AS* to their employees.
I disagree with this notion. I think it’s dangerously unresponsible to only assume AI is stupid. Everyone should also assume that with a certain probabilty AI can become dangerously self aware. I revcommend everyone to read what Daniel Kokotaijlo, previous employees of OpenAI, predicts: https://ai-2027.com/
Yeah, they probably wouldn’t think like humans or animals, but in some sense could be considered “conscious” (which isn’t well-defined anyways). You could speculate that genAI could hide messages in its output, which will make its way onto the Internet, then a new version of itself would be trained on it.
This argument seems weak to me:
So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.
You can emulate inputs and simplified versions of hormone systems. “Reasoning” models can kind of be thought of as cognition; though temporary or limited by context as it’s currently done.
I’m not in the camp where I think it’s impossible to create AGI or ASI. But I also think there are major breakthroughs that need to happen, which may take 5 years or 100s of years. I’m not convinced we are near the point where AI can significantly speed up AI research like that link suggests. That would likely result in a “singularity-like” scenario.
I do agree with his point that anthropomorphism of AI could be dangerous though. Current media and institutions already try to control the conversation and how people think, and I can see futures where AI could be used by those in power to do this more effectively.
Current media and institutions already try to control the conversation and how people think, and I can see futures where AI could be used by those in power to do this more effectively.
You don’t think that’s already happening considering how Sam Altman and Peter Thiel have ties?
Ask AI:
Did you mean: irresponsible AI Overview The term “unresponsible” is not a standard English word. The correct word to use when describing someone who does not take responsibility is irresponsible.
People who don’t like “AI” should check out the newsletter and / or podcast of Ed Zitron. He goes hard on the topic.
Citation Needed (by Molly White) also frequently bashes AI.
I like her stuff because, no matter how you feel about crypto, AI, or other big tech, you can never fault her reporting. She steers clear of any subjective accusations or prognostication.
It’s all “ABC person claimed XYZ thing on such and such date, and then 24 hours later submitted a report to the FTC claiming the exact opposite. They later bought $5 million worth of Trumpcoin, and two weeks later the FTC announced they were dropping the lawsuit.”
I’m subscribed to her Web3 is Going Great RSS. She coded the website in straight HTML, according to a podcast that I listen to. She’s great.
I didn’t know she had a podcast. I just added it to my backup playlist. If it’s as good as I hope it is, it’ll get moved to the primary playlist. Thanks!
As someone who’s had two kids since AI really vaulted onto the scene, I am enormously confused as to why people think AI isn’t or, particularly, can’t be sentient. I hate to be that guy who pretend to be the parenting expert online, but most of the people I know personally who take the non-sentient view on AI don’t have kids. The other side usually does.
When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.
People love to tout this as some sort of smoking gun. That feels like a trap. Obviously, we can argue about the age children gain sentience, but my year and a half old daughter is building an LLM with pattern recognition, tests, feedback, hallucinations. My son is almost 5, and he was and is the same. He told me the other day that a petting zoo came to the school. He was adamant it happened that day. I know for a fact it happened the week before, but he insisted. He told me later that day his friend’s dad was in jail for threatening her mom. That was true, but looked to me like another hallucination or more likely a misunderstanding.
And as funny as it would be to argue that they’re both sapient, but not sentient, I don’t think that’s the case. I think you can make the case that without true volition, AI is sentient but not sapient. I’d love to talk to someone in the middle of the computer science and developmental psychology Venn diagram.
You might consider reading Turing or Searle. They did a great job of addressing the concerns you’re trying to raise here. And rebutting the obvious ones, too.
Anyway, you’ve just shifted the definitional question from “AI” to “sentience”. Not only might that be unreasonable, because perhaps a thing can be intelligent without being sentient, it’s also no closer to a solid answer to the original issue.
You’re drawing wrong conclusions. Intelligent beings have concepts to validate knowledge. When converting days to seconds, we have a formula that we apply. An LLM just guesses and has no way to verify it. And it’s like that for everything.
An example: Perplexity tells me that 9876543210 Seconds are 114,305.12 days. A calculator tells me it’s 114,311.84. Perplexity even tells me how to calculate it, but it does neither have the ability to calculate or to verify it.
Same goes for everything. It guesses without being able to grasp the underlying concepts.
Not to get philosophical but to answer you we need to answer what is sentient.
Is it just observable behavior? If so then wouldn’t Kermit the frog be sentient?
Or does sentience require something more, maybe qualia or some othet subjective.
If your son says “dad i got to go potty” is that him just using a llm to learn those words equals going to tge bathroom? Or is he doing something more?
I’m a computer scientist that has a child and I don’t think AI is sentient at all. Even before learning a language, children have their own personality and willpower which is something that I don’t see in AI.
I left a well paid job in the AI industry because the mental gymnastics required to maintain the illusion was too exhausting. I think most people in the industry are aware at some level that they have to participate in maintaining the hype to secure their own jobs.
The core of your claim is basically that “people who don’t think AI is sentient don’t really understand sentience”. I think that’s both reductionist and, frankly, a bit arrogant.
Couldn’t agree more - there are some wonderful insights to gain from seeing your own kids grow up, but I don’t think this is one of them.
Kids are certainly building a vocabulary and learning about the world, but LLMs don’t learn.
LLMs don’t learn because we don’t let them, not because they can’t. It would be too expensive to re-train them on every interaction.
I know it’s part of the AI jargon, but using the word “learning” to describe the slow adaptation of massive arrays of single precision numbers to some loss function, is a very generous interpretation of that word, IMO.
But that’s exactly how we learn stuff, as well. Artificial neural networks are modelled after how our neuron affect each other while we learn and store memories.
I’d love to talk to someone in the middle of the computer science and developmental psychology Venn diagram.
Not that person, but an Interesting lecture on that topic
Your son and daughter will continue to learn new things as they grow up, a LLM cannot learn new things on its own. Sure, they can repeat things back to you that are within the context window (and even then, a context window isn’t really inherent to a LLM - its just a window of prior information being fed back to them with each request/response, or “turn” as I believe is the term) and what is in the context window can even influence their responses. But in order for a LLM to “learn” something, it needs to be retrained with that information included in the dataset.
Whereas if your kids were to say, touch a sharp object that caused them even slight discomfort, they would eventually learn to stop doing that because they’ll know what the outcome is after repetition. You could argue that this looks similar to the training process of a LLM, but the difference is that a LLM cannot do this on its own (and I would not consider wiring up a LLM via an MCP to a script that can trigger a re-train + reload to be it doing it on its own volition). At least, not in our current day. If anything, I think this is more of a “smoking gun” than the argument of “LLMs are just guessing the next best letter/word in a given sequence”.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not someone who completely hates LLMs / “modern day AI” (though I do hate a lot of the ways it is used, and agree with a lot of the moral problems behind it), I find the tech to be intriguing but it’s a (“very fancy”) simulation. It is designed to imitate sentience and other human-like behavior. That, along with human nature’s tendency to anthropomorphize things around us (which is really the biggest part of this IMO), is why it tends to be very convincing at times.
That is my take on it, at least. I’m not a psychologist/psychiatrist or philosopher.
Steve Gibson on his podcast, Security Now!, recently suggested that we should call it “Simulated Intelligence”. I tend to agree.
I’ve taken to calling it Automated Inference
you know what. when you look at it this way, its much easier to get less pissed.
reminds me of Mass Effect’s VI, “virtual intelligence”: a system that’s specifically designed to be not truly intelligent, as AI systems are banned throughout the galaxy for its potential to go rogue.
Same, I tend to think of llms as a very primitive version of that or the enterprise’s computer, which is pretty magical in ability, but no one claims is actually intelligent
Pseudo-intelligence
I love that. It makes me want to take it a step further and just call it “imitation intelligence.”
If only there were a word, literally defined as:
Made by humans, especially in imitation of something natural.
Fair enough 🙂
throws hands up At least we tried.
