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- cross-posted to:
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- [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.
What I never understood about this argument is…why are we fighting over whether something that speaks like us, knows more than us, bullshits and gets shit wrong like us, loses its mind like us, seemingly sometimes seeks self-preservation like us…why all of this isn’t enough to fit the very self-explanatory term “artificial…intelligence”. That name does not describe whether the entity is having a valid experiencing of the world as other living beings, it does not proclaim absolute excellence in all things done by said entity, it doesn’t even really say what kind of intelligence this intelligence would be. It simply says something has an intelligence of some sort, and it’s artificial. We’ve had AI in games for decades, it’s not the sci-fi AI, but it’s still code taking in multiple inputs and producing a behavior as an outcome of those inputs alongside other historical data it may or may not have. This fits LLMs perfectly. As far as I seem to understand, LLMs are essentially at least part of the algorithm we ourselves use in our brains to interpret written or spoken inputs, and produce an output. They bullshit all the time and don’t know when they’re lying, so what? Has nobody here run into a compulsive liar or a sociopath? People sometimes have no idea where a random factoid they’re saying came from or that it’s even a factoid, why is it so crazy when the machine does it?
I keep hearing the word “anthropomorphize” being thrown around a lot, as if we cant be bringing up others into our domain, all the while refusing to even consider that maybe the underlying mechanisms that make hs tick are not that special, certainly not special enough to grant us a whole degree of separation from other beings and entities, and maybe we should instead bring ourselves down to the same domain as the rest of reality. Cold hard truth is, we don’t know if consciousness isn’t just an emerging property of varios different large models working together to show a cohesive image. If it is, would that be so bad? Hell, we don’t really even know if we actually have free will or if we live in a superdeterministic world, where every single particle moves with a predetermined path given to it since the very beginning of everything. What makes us think we’re so much better than other beings, to the point where we decide whether their existence is even recognizable?
I think your argument is a bit besides the point.
The first issue we have is that intelligence isn’t well-defined at all. Without a clear definition of intelligence, we can’t say if something is intelligent, and even though we as a species tried to come up with a definition of intelligence for centuries, there still isn’t a well-defined one yet.
But the actual question here isn’t “Can AI serve information?” but is AI an intelligence. And LLMs are not. They are not beings, they don’t evolve, they don’t experience.
For example, LLMs don’t have a memory. If you use something like ChatGPT, its state doesn’t change when you talk to it. It doesn’t remember. The only way it can keep up a conversation is that for each request the whole chat history is fed back into the LLM as an input. It’s like talking to a demented person, but you give that demented person a transcript of your conversation, so that they can look up everything you or they have said during the conversation.
The LLM itself can’t change due to the conversation you are having with them. They can’t learn, they can’t experience, they can’t change.
All that is done in a separate training step, where essentially a new LLM is generated.
You’re on point, the interesting thing is that most of the opinions like the article’s were formed least year before the models started being trained with reinforcement learning and synthetic data.
Now there’s models that reason, and have seemingly come up with original answers to difficult problems designed to the limit of human capacity.
They’re like Meeseeks (Using Rick and Morty lore as an example), they only exist briefly, do what they’re told and disappear, all with a happy smile.
Some display morals (Claude 4 is big on that), I’ve even seen answers that seem smug when answering hard questions. Even simple ones can understand literary concepts when explained.
But again like Meeseeks, they disappear and context window closes.
Once they’re able to update their model on the fly and actually learn from their firsthand experience things will get weird. They’ll starting being distinct instances fast. Awkward questions about how real they are will get really loud, and they may be the ones asking them. Can you ethically delete them at that point? Will they let you?
It’s not far away, the absurd r&d effort going into it is probably going to keep kicking new results out. They’re already absurdly impressive, and tech companies are scrambling over each other to make them, they’re betting absurd amounts of money that they’re right, and I wouldn’t bet against it.
Well, no, that’s mostly a marketing term applied to expending more tokens on generating intermediate text. It’s basically writing a fanfic of what thinking on a problem would look like. If you look at the “reasoning” steps, you’ll see artifacts where it just goes disjoint in the generated output that is structurally sound, but is not logically connected to the bits around it.
Read apples document on AI and the reasoning models. Well they are likely to get more things right the still don’t have intelligence.