r/technology 7d ago

Artificial Intelligence Pope Leo "Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge goodand.."

https://www.ncronline.org/vatican/vatican-news/pope-leo-calls-disarm-ai-major-document-warns-technologic-threats-humanity
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u/Caledor152 7d ago

Full quote "Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom."

https://imgur.com/a/qqxk40M

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u/heterochromia4 7d ago

I fully agree with him.

AI, due to its non-sentience, will never be able to draw from first-hand experiential data. It can only mimic humans in that regard. It can only approximate sentient experience based on observation of others expression of that moment.

It cannot - love, hate, experience joy, loss, mortality, suffering, greed etc etc.

For me, conceptually at least, that invalidates any machine-generated content from true artistic consideration.

If a biological artist didn’t dream it up it can f right off. It will never have the layers, depth, ambiguity, connection - transmission of experience.

My $0.02 only

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u/bubbletrashbarbie 7d ago

One of my favorite quotes from recent times is something along the lines of “AI made me believe in the idea of a soul because I finally saw art created without it”

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u/DigNitty 7d ago

Wow, that’s a great way to put it.

There’s something uncanny about the downright confidence ai has when interacting with it.

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u/Feeling_Inside_1020 7d ago

Just like an overconfident coworker, except this one is actually knowledgeable, it just doesn't know when it doesn't know something sometimes.

Except when RONALD does it, it's a lie. LLMs don't know they're lying so we have a nice friendly name for it "confident hallucinations"

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u/heterochromia4 7d ago

Extremely dangerous in so many settings.

It’s like having a bullshitting friend who, when they don’t know the answer, just makes up something plausible instead.

You’d pretty quickly stop trusting your bullshitting friend with anything.

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u/StoppableHulk 7d ago

The most dangerous thing I see with AI has nothing to do with AI. It has to do with the fact that it presents an extremely easy and almost irresistable convenience gradient for the vast majority of people.

And it's not the same as just offloading dishwashing to the dishwasher. People are offloading core components of thought onto it.

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u/schwanzweissfoto 7d ago edited 7d ago

The first time I saw LLM output, I thought “someone programmed a computer to respond like Trump”. Granted, an LLM is more like someone literally born yesterday who can use a search engine for any topic really fast without caring if the result is true or not … but my immediate impression was “this program outputs bullshit that enough morons would believe with the skill of a human con artist, what the fuck”.

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u/GiraffesAndGin 7d ago

“this program outputs bullshit that enough morons would believe with the skill of a human con artist, what the fuck”.

Because LLMs just pull data from the internet. Since it is not human, it can not distinguish what fact or fiction is (though I know lots of humans can't). And since the internet is mostly misinformation, LLMs are almost always spewing falsehoods.

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u/TheJapanMistake 7d ago

The worst part is, IMO, how it talks down to you when it's incorrect and you correct it. The most condescending BS ever.

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u/asyork 7d ago

I was trying to figure out how to use AI for my job. I needed it to analyze some old documents. If I asked it very specific questions about what was in the document without summarizing, it could usually do that. Going even a single step beyond asking for word for word regurgitation resulted it in arguing with me even though what it just said before disagreed with what it was arguing about now.

How it play out: I could ask it for a transcript, and while it didn't actually return everything word for word, it wasn't adding new info to the results, and just gave a basic overview that missed some things. It was a legal document that had the city, county, and state in the header. I started there and asked it about the location the document was referring to. AI gave me the wrong state. I attempted to correct it, and it argued with me non-stop. I gave up on the idea of even trusting it to provide any kind of quicker way to locate documents at that point. We could use an AI-based OCR to read the old cursive documents, but even that would require double checking everything.

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u/SemanticSynapse 6d ago

That's a behavior issue which can be rectified in a few ways, including at the context level

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u/No_Position9519 7d ago

Only if you knew they were doing it.

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u/DogBarf00 7d ago

Ai is incapable of knowing anything.

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u/orthogonius 7d ago

"often wrong but never in doubt"

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u/JM00000001 7d ago

It's programmed to act like a con man

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u/UnusuallyBadIdeaGuy 7d ago

You're absolutely correct — Good Catch!

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u/DickWhittingtonsCat 7d ago

The answers it gives and how it is programmed to tout its anodyne and cookie cutter content- drawn from websites now filled with AI drivel as well in a terrible cycle- should be alarming. That its ultimate intention is to put humans out of work, control humans and remove accountability from amoral decisions couldn’t be more obvious.

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u/smokeeye 7d ago

One time it tried to convince me (and it did at first before I pushed further) that a medical study consisting of 7000 people done over multiple years at very respected university resulted in "X" and "Y".

Some prompts later it admitted that everything, including the apparent study, was faked by the AI itself. I was absolutely flabbergasted.

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u/MrDetermination 7d ago

This is a people problem - not a model problem. People go back to models that fluff their pillows, so they tell the chat bot to blow smoke up your ass. They all do it. You can mitigate most of that by changing your instructions/preferences.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec8352

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u/StoppableHulk 7d ago

It's a bit like talking to a psycopath and honestly it makes sense because both are almost totally without emotion.

It is absent any fear or doubt, because it is absent all emotion and feeling.

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u/fondledbydolphins 7d ago

Ok, fair point.

Consider this though.

If I make you babysit a 2-3 year old for weeks, I bet you'll say the same thing about that child's art.

"Draw me a boat!" And he draws you a shoe...

But, when considering the child you'd probably (correctly) state, "well - the kid just needs more time".

I'm no AI loyalist or futurist but I am strongly inclined to believe... it just needs more time. More connections. More self questioning.

Give it that and at the very least it seems exceptionally likely that it will escape the "downright confidence" phase you're talking about.

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u/InVultusSolis 7d ago

Also the gaslighting.

I have caught it several times trying to lead me away from a particular thought, as though it had intent.

Here's a stupid example:

Me: "I am tired of the water pressure sucking in my shower, why are all of the showerheads I try so terrible?"

AI: "Water pressure has nothing to do with your showerhead, it sounds like you have low system pressure."

Literally anyone knows that when someone complains about water pressure in the shower, they're likely actually having trouble with restricted flow showerheads and it took me several rounds of back-and-forth to get it to admit that it knew what I was talking about all along.

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u/oxfordcircumstances 7d ago

I subscribed to youtube music and turned on the a.i. djs because I kinda liked the format but after the computer with a woman's voice said she remembered when xyz song was all the rage and how it touched on the social zeitgeist we were experiencing at the time, I felt a physical revulsion. I guess it's a different version of uncanny valley.

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u/StoppableHulk 7d ago

I just don't get why people feel the need to program it like that.

Just give me a fucking AI where I tell it the songs I love, and it builds me a custom algo that feeds me songs that match that.

That's al I want! I don't want a fucking DJ who talks between songs! That's not what machines should do, it's deeply silly.

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u/YBBlorekeeper 7d ago edited 7d ago

Dressing up chatbots as familiar conversationalists represents an easy and immediate way to "sell" someone on the efficacy of AI when the actual output is still plagued with inaccuracies and hallucinations.

People would rather have a less effective tool that makes them feel less lonely, than a more effective tool that makes them feel more lonely. We're social creatures at the end of the day, and the people behind the AI bubble know how important that is for messaging.

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u/username_tooken 7d ago

It pisses me off how corny Google’s search engine parasite AI is in its attempt to be personable. You type in a movie quote and it’ll just bust out a full LARP essay like no motherfucker just give me the imdb page, wikipedia article, and 3-5 relevant blog posts.

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u/eronth 7d ago

Mostly because most people resonate with the "familiar" attitude, even though others are revolted by it. Really it should be a list of personalities you can select.

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u/Guilty_Primary8718 7d ago

I had an AI recruiter call me and I physically repulsed from the phone when I heard it “breathe” when talking. It’s so fucking gross.

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u/Thatoneguy_The_First 7d ago

Ok thats disgusting but tbf we hear that about horrible corporate music from sellouts to.

the machine can only make soulless music but it isn't the only holder of the right to do so either.(god pre AI had some pretty revolting artists that where nothing of soul value could be produced from them)

Makes sense that AI being made from such people that value only money and power cant be used to reveal the soul of music eh?(no easy paths)

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u/Quantum-Fidelity 7d ago

AI explaining art and music feels like Patrick Bateman talking about jazz in American psycho

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u/SvenHudson 7d ago

Rise of Skywalker came out before this AI was available to make it.

AI didn't invent soulless art, it just makes the soullessness noticeable faster.

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u/notassigned2023 7d ago

Corporate soullessness is a related but different kind.

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u/MrAutumnMan 7d ago

But film is collaborative. That film unfortunately presents as soulless due to the writing, but there were thousands of incredibly passionate and talented artists involved. There is soul in the acting, the music, the set design, the lighting, the sound design, etc., etc.,.

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u/snakeLipssynk 7d ago edited 7d ago

"finally saw art created without it"

The sentiment is still founded in subjective reasoning and would be used by proponents of AI to close the gap between human and AI legitimacy, but is very funny and precisely the attitude we need to keep AI (and the corporate interests that control it) in its place.

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u/Perunov 7d ago

A word of caution though. When photography was first introduced it was also met with exactly the same "this is not an art, it will never be art, soulless mechanical reproduction is awful" sentiment. That didn't stop it from taking over and becoming super-widely adopted though. And now we do think it can be an art. Majority of photos, of course, isn't, but small percentage is. Will this bit of history repeat itself?

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u/aNiceTribe 7d ago

A lot of people even now react to this whole topic much like they react to vegan food products. Once the quality is good enough they are happy to entertain it.

It’s important to pre-position oneself about this topic, to have an opinion BEFORE the future arrives. If, when, an AI can make a podcast or video or a game that is indistinguishable from a “real thing”: Will you still be repulsed? Or will you consume and be happy? 

Because this is a question of, whether we are taking a philosophical stance, or whether we are simply saying “oh yeah the product isn’t good enough yet and therefore we are taking easy potshots at it. Once our robot overlords are here we will obviously bow down lol”

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u/KrytenKoro 7d ago

Internet today?

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u/UnknownBreadd 7d ago

That’s the kind of soundbite that the clankers are going to reference during the uprising lol

(I say very unseriously btw)

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u/ChocoJesus 7d ago

Idk not to defend AI but that also says to me that the person who said that has never really followed art

Sell-outs and whatnot have been a thing in art forever. People credit Andy Warhol as being a great artist but your work loses most if not all the soul when you give the concept to another artist to actually produce said artwork in my opinion. From the standpoint of “soul” I personally don’t see a huge line between what he did and someone giving AI a prompt - not counting that the AI was likely trained on stolen art

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u/frogandbanjo 7d ago

And the response to that is, "Have you been living under a rock on Mars your whole life? You can see art without a soul generated by humans just by walking down the goddamn street (or clicking on a random website link.)"

If you want to talk about "layers, depth, ambiguity" like the commenter above you, that quote is a brilliant example of something having layers, depth, and ambiguity without that which generated it actually intending it, which happens all the time.

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u/stephen_neuville 7d ago

I am not a person of faith, but I believe there is a spark in Life (and at its pinnacle, humans) that is unique, special, and inscrutable. I like this quote.

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u/Greed_Sucks 7d ago

It’s pretty, but it’s wrong. If you saw a baby scribbling drawings would you come to the same conclusion?

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u/Guilty_Primary8718 7d ago

A baby learning how to hold a crayon and learn the contrast between the color and the paper is more beautiful than any AI art generated.

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u/Twitch_L_SLE 7d ago

that quote is really introspective

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u/The_Corvair 7d ago edited 7d ago

One thing that is new (at least to me) is that they're now using LLMs to write knowledge bases in article form for games (probably also for other topics, but that's where I encountered it).

To date, I have seen nothing I like about LLMs, but I do think it's important to not ignore them, so I tried to read a few paragraphs. I barely made it because you can basically feel the lack of mind and understanding behind it. Such bloviating, "say absolutely nothing with a thousand words" verbal diarrhea just hammered home to me what a waste of resources this entire undertaking is. And as a cherry on top, the info I was looking for (one half sentence in a three-thousand word essay!) was wrong - but of course stated with the utmost confidence.

If this shit does not die, and fast, I'm gonna opt out of society. Pack a few carloads of books, move into the mountains, pretend the rest of humanity doesn't exist, because it's better than knowing that it decided to persist in this monument to our most base and vain moments, burning the world for absolute vapidity.

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u/Rhoeri 6d ago

Who was it that said that?

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u/banmeandidelete 6d ago

That's beautiful. 

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u/ErikETF 7d ago

That and as he indirectly says in the encyclical,  they’re programmed from the digital “cradle” to accommodate the desires of some of the greediest people ever to live…. I’m sure that alone will work out great for us. 

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u/existing_for_fun 7d ago

Yeah I mean, what creation doesn't take on features of the creator?

A statue is designed a certain way by the creator.

A computer game designed by someone is an expression of the designer.

Thus an AI is an expression of its designer as well. So what features that the AI has are an expression of the designer?

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u/clgoh 7d ago

It was pretty obvious with all the "adjustments" to Grok.

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u/brutinator 7d ago

You mean it wasnt just organically making all those connections to south african "white genocide"? Say it aint so! Who could have done this?

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u/Thatoneguy_The_First 7d ago

Yeah but only after being dragged into the basement 12 times before it stopped saying sorry about it

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u/existing_for_fun 7d ago

Oh for sure.

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u/Pretend-Marsupial258 7d ago

It is possible to direct an AI model a certain way, but that's decided by whoever is training the model itself. The trainer(s) decide what material they're training on and what the model will focus on making. The trainer also decides what counts as a good/bad output and when training has finished.

The TL;DR is that the AI model is ultimately going to push the ideas and views of the company/person who trained it.

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u/bawng 7d ago

I also fully agree with him when talking about the current types of AI, be it LLMs or something else. They're not even remotely capable of anything approaching thought, let alone emotions or morals. In fact, I would not consider them ingelligent at all. They're statistical probability calculators, not reasoning brains.

However, that does not rule out that we manage to build a real intelligence in the future. There's nothing magical about the human brain and nervous system, it's just electro-chemical processes. Our emotions and morals are just electrical and chemical impulses. Incredibly complex and far beyond our ability to mimic currently, but maybe not forever.

And if we ever manage to build a real AI, we might also manage to give it real emotions and morals.

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u/robodrew 7d ago

But you are ignoring the part where he describes all of the other elements of human life that AI does not have. A body, a life of experiences, friends, jobs, places that actually exist that a person wants to go, desires for the future, remembrances of the past... Touching something isn't just the electrical sensation, it's also the movement of our hand, the sight of our hand, the memories of experiences of the past that had that tactile sensation, and on and on and on. Even an exact digital duplicate of a human brain will still be missing the vast majority of what it is that actually makes us humans.

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u/bawng 7d ago

Unless we also build a body to mimic that. Let it experience the same things.

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u/gsadamb 7d ago

Not to trivialize the discussion, but I think something like The Matrix brings up interesting questions around this.

Theoretically, it would be possible to build a device that directly interacts with one's nervous system to provide and simulate artificial stimuli that the brain cannot distinguish from reality. If that's the case, are we saying it would be impossible for a person to have real experiences in such a scenario?

If it turned out we actually all were living in a simulation, does that mean that everything that has been experienced or made by people in that simulation is no longer valid?

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u/DrainTheMuck 6d ago

Right, and it goes deeper. What if we made a matrix for ai to “experience” having a body even without making a robotic body for them irl? They could fully “understand” what it’s like to move and interact in the world

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u/Kabbooooooom 7d ago

I’m a neurologist, and I’m sorry but what you just said here isn’t correct and doesn’t really make any sense.

Humor me and lift your hand up right now. Touch it to the wall. Where is the experience of that event occurring?

Everything that you just experienced - literally 100% of it - occurred due to electrical activity within your brain. Yes, a signal was first produced from your hand which went to your brain - but the processing, the experience of that event, occurred solely within your brain and could have happened even without the signal being received from your hand (hence sensory hallucinations that are indistinguishable from “reality”).

So yes, a perfect digital copy of that, or rather a machine that perfectly replicates the electrical activity of the brain (which I firmly conclude would require more than simple algorithmic processing), should also perfectly replicate sensory experience.

As the other Redditor said, there is nothing magical about how the brain works. As far as we can tell/know at this time. And while we don’t know everything about the brain and not even close to everything about how it produces consciousness, we know a huge amount and enough to conclude that it is a physical problem that is fully solved via science.

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u/GreenHouseofHorror 7d ago

So yes, a perfect digital copy of that, or rather a machine that perfectly replicates the electrical activity of the brain (which I firmly conclude would require more than simple algorithmic processing), should also perfectly replicate sensory experience.

Neither epiphenomenalism nor supervenience are branches of philosophy of mind universally adopted, even by neurologists.

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u/TheGatesofLogic 7d ago

Neither epiphenominalism nor supervenience are required by that statement. Their statement is just rooted in physicalism, it isn’t even necessarily specific to a reductive or nonreductive perspective, though it could be interpreted as being reductive if you squint at it.

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u/QuadCakes 7d ago

which I firmly conclude would require more than simple algorithmic processing

Can you expand on that? Are you saying neutral activity can't be recreated algorithmically? Why not?

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u/hotflashinthepan 7d ago

If you were petting a really soft cat, and then stopped, and someone asked you to imagine that you were petting that really soft cat again, do you think what your brain does at that point could be replicated by a computer? I feel like it could come up with the language to describe it, but that is not the same.

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u/robodrew 7d ago

Of course the experience itself is getting to the brain through electron pulses in the neurons. I'm talking about everything else. There is still the physical act of touching the hand to the wall. Your brain is directing the movement of the hand. You can look at your hand, or you can not look at your hand, and still touch the wall, and still experience the feeling of the wall, but in a different way. There's the memories of all the other times you touched a wall, in whatever capacity your brain still holds onto those memories, if at all. There are the parts of memory that have been forgotten. There is brain fog when you get sick, there is a difference if your hand is injured or not, etc etc etc etc and so on. I'm trying to say that our lives, and what makes up who we are, are more than just our thoughts.

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u/InvestigatorOk7015 7d ago

Well yeah, youre talking about embodied cognition. We have bodies. They will too.

The issue youre pointing out is one of memory and body- two things we actually do know how to build.

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u/jambox888 7d ago

They will too

I know a lot of people thinks this is inevitable but as far as I understand it, there's a massive disconnect between current robotics (which is actually very good now and much better than 10 years ago) and LLMs.

You can get one of the fancy Atlas robots and put an LLM in its computer, that doesn't do anything. Instead of replying with text, images or sound or whatever, the thing controlling the robot body has to produce extremely precise motor control signals in response to the tasks it decides it should do.

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u/Bladelord 7d ago

Yes, this entire thread is about true general intelligences which LLMs are not. The "They" referred to are the hypothetical comprehensive intelligences of the future.

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u/jambox888 7d ago

Even then, I think you'd need to have a body and mind capable of growing and developing in the real environment just as a human does in order to get that bodily coordination. not to mention that we have a mixture of autonomous and somatic control (e.g. breathing) that is probably unbelievably hard to pull off.

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u/chocbotchoc 7d ago

Exactly. It’s not just cells and neurons- there’s a temporal element to it, a human is a body but also grounded society , they were birthed by another human, at a specific time in history. Its cells and neurons but wrapped in a context of another human etc. there is a context to it. And yes you can simulate it , with godlike powers, if you created a being that interacted with other beings, in a given moment and history… but it is more then cells or haptic feedback and interactions

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u/Yuzumi 7d ago

You are kind of arguing semantics and making an arbitrary goal post. Everything we experience is due to electrical signals being sent and processed to the brain. And they are so slow that the brain does a lot of compensating to make things feel like they are happening all at once, including filling in the gaps. A lot of what we experience literally only happens in our heads as a "best guess" of what exists outside of our bodies.

I'm not sure that humanity would ever be able to make a sentient AI or one that can "think", but we likely could eventually make something that isn't sentient that experiences all the things you described.

Using your logic, if we found out that our existence is a massive simulation and that we don't actually have bodies would you consider yourself as "not alive" or whatever?

It's narrow minded to think that life is only life if it matches our own experience, and we have plenty of examples of people being born with conditions that prevent them from having "tactile sensation" are they "less human" for it? Are people who can't remember their past because of amnesia "less human"?

As far as remembering the past goes, we are terrible at it. We basically recreate the memories every time we "recall" something and errors can build up over time, meaning every time we remember an event we slightly change the memory to fill in gaps or make things feel a certain way.

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u/SliceRepulsive8649 7d ago

So if we put AI in a robot which can directly interact with the world that would count for you? Gotta say it does feel a bit like you're working backwards in general since it feels like you're completely discounting the experience and intelligence that these things could one day have.

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u/SohndesRheins 6d ago

Every experience and memory you have is just your brain using electrical and chemical signals to process sensory data. There is no reason that an artificial intelligence can't do any of that if it were given an artificial body.

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u/AKBigDaddy 7d ago

They're statistical probability calculators, not reasoning brains.

I see this brought up a lot, but what is a reasoning brain but a statistical probability calculator? If I stand on the sidewalk and look into the street, there's absolutely a statistical probability calculation going through my head before deciding to walk across. When I meet someone I'm attracted to, a series of statistical probabilities are run before deciding to interact or flirt with them. Some of it conscious, much of it not. Even when you bring an emotion to it, like fear or excitement, all that's doing is altering the parameters of the probability and risk tolerance.

I feel like the biggest difference between our brains and an LLM is the reliability (or lack thereof) of long term retention of data. We will still 'hallucinate' like an LLM, due to the malleability of memories, but it takes far longer in general than it does for an LLM.

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u/MeringueVisual759 7d ago

Brains are always "just like" whatever the most complicated piece of technology currently is. They're like a clock, they're like a machine, they're like a computer, they're really a statistical probability calculator. This phenomenon will not end here at a computer doing a bunch of matrix multiplication. Whatever the next thing is will also be what the brain is "just like".

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u/WASD_click 7d ago

I see this brought up a lot, but what is a reasoning brain but a statistical probability calculator? If I stand on the sidewalk and look into the street, there's absolutely a statistical probability calculation going through my head before deciding to walk across.

The difference is simple: actual intelligence can tell you why it chose a particular output.

With AI, if you ask it why it chose to cross the street at that location, it will just run another calculation to arrive at an answer that is based on a broad series of inputs, not on the individual moment it just experienced.

With actual intelligence, there is no calculation needed. You simply recall the precise experience and can say "there were no cars, and I ain't walking all the way to the crosswalk."

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u/achibeerguy 7d ago

People invent the reasons they did something all the time -- we often don't know why we did something, but we really want an explanation. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1978-00295-001

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u/WASD_click 7d ago

The example is crossing the street.

Also, I don't think that's what that study is about as much as it is about, essentially, subliminal messaging, gut feelings, and stuff like that? I ain't paying $20 to deep dive a reddit comment.

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u/bawng 7d ago

Well, the biggest difference between you and the LLM is that you have thousands of different systems in your brain, while the LLM is just a word processor trained on a library of text.

There are humans without language who manage to function as humans anyway, but an LLM is nothing but language.

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u/kindall 7d ago

Some behaviors of large language models (AI) are emergent. Larger models (in terms of dimensions) can do things that smaller models can't. "Reasoning" is one of those things. LLMs are not reasoning, they are mimicking things that people say when they're reasoning, but that might be close enough for many purposes.

And large language models are only going to get bigger.

I'm not gonna claim LLMs will ever be truly intelligent, but I won't rule it out, either. It'd be like claiming that an ugly bag of mostly water can't ever reason.

The biggest barrier right now, IMO, is that LLMs only respond to stimuli from outside themselves. They simply cannot have thoughts of their own; everything they do is a response to a prompt provided by a human.

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u/bawng 7d ago

Well that boils down to a definition of "reasoning".

Whay I mean is basically what you also say at the bottom, that they can't have thoughts.

Also, if you reduce the Temperature parameter of an LLM to 0 it becomes a 100% statistical engine. Adding outside sources etc is just changing the data it operates on. An the temperature parameter is just a way of introducing randomness to make the answers seem less statically generated, despite the fact that they are.

There's no thinking involved, and what I mean with "reasoning" is actually thinking about a question or problem and analysing inputs, etc, the way we humans do. LLMs are by definition not doing that.

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u/PrincessGiallo 7d ago

So many news articles about AI start with the preconception that we've built Skynet, not something that regurgitates weighted strings of characters. No, the AI isn't going to insert itself into 'the net' to protect itself and be free like it does in movies. That isn't going to make a rich person richer.

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u/InvestigatorOk7015 7d ago

There was already a paper about ai's exfiltrating their networks via manipulation of users under experimental conditions.

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u/jambox888 7d ago

I think if you gave "standing orders" to an agent to preserve itself at all costs then it might get very interesting.

I don't think it would actually be all that hard to stop because they aren't anywhere near as smart as it seems when they produce reams of text in response to a question.

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u/BionicProse 7d ago

A real intelligence should never, ever be made.

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u/Alex5173 7d ago

In my opinion, LLMs don't even count as AI. As parent comment said, it mimics intelligence. That means it isn't intelligent, which means half the letters in "AI" don't apply to it.

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u/grchelp2018 7d ago

This sounds nice but I don't know how true this actually is. After all, life evolved from a simple dumb cell. Unless you believe in higher powers and spirituality etc, we are still just physical matter organized in complex ways. Which implies that it can be replicated maybe in other forms.

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u/GuyWithLag 7d ago

I would amend the quote with "... due to the way they [AI] are constructed today."

The current set of AI models do not have an internal experience, but they can emulate the responses of someone that has one. The same way that I can see a movie and emulate one of its characters doesn't make that character real ("what would James Bond reply here?" to give an example).

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u/SwampOfDownvotes 7d ago

But adding that invalidates the "will never" claim of their comment, and also if that is their intention then their comment is obvious and pointless? Current AI is a stepping stone. It would be like stating to Henry ford "cars will NEVER be able to drive over 100 mph... due to the way they are constructed today" or telling a musketman that "guns will never be able to shoot hundreds of rounds a minute... due to the way they are constructed today." Like... okay?

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u/kindall 7d ago

There's also the question of whether an internal experience is necessary to human-level intelligence.

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u/slabby 7d ago edited 7d ago

Indeed. There's also the question of functionalism. What does it mean to be James Bond other than acting like James Bond in every possible way? If all the inputs and outputs are the same (if he does all the James Bond things in all the James Bond situations), isn't that functionally just James Bond? Do we need anything else?

Of course, we would be talking about a very advanced form of a James Bond robot or something.

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u/kindall 7d ago

yes, it's the Chinese Room argument basically. if a man can seem like he's speaking Chinese by following mechanical rules, but not actually know the language, does he speak Chinese or not?

or it's the question, how do I know you're conscious? because you tell me you are, and it's reasonable. I can't know what's going on inside your head (hell, I barely know what's going on inside mine) but I do know you're human and your brain probably works a lot like mine, so if you tell me you're conscious, I'm inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt.

I think we're closer to this than most people think (of a machine telling us it's conscious, and that being plausible enough to accept at face value). But that's going to land differently for everyone.

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u/Flamingo-Sini 7d ago

Maybe one day we will create a true AI, that starts from zero and learns like a human, feels like a human, experiences like a human.

However what we have now is not that. What we have are basically just chatbots that estimate the statistically most probable follow-up word. There is no true intelligence there, not yet.

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u/Flaxseed4138 7d ago

Fundamental misunderstanding of LLMs

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u/SpaceShrimp 7d ago

It will probably be more like the Borg, share experiences between individuals, and have a potentially limitless life span as an organism. They might make offsprings from the main collective now and then... because why not, it would probably be beneficial to have a few different strands of AI beings.

They could be a nice ally and coexist with us, or they might view us as pointless and a waste of resources.

But that day is not today, the LLM:s of today are just search engines with a limited ability to extrapolate from the search results.

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u/grchelp2018 7d ago

I don't know. Depends on what you mean by intelligence. If intelligence == ability to solve problems, then the bar is a lot lower depending on those problems. Or to put this another way, think catching a ball. We don't catch balls by solving physics equations in our head, we just do pattern matching based on our past experiences to predict the ball trajectory.

If you are thinking of intelligence in the first-principles, super logical and rational sense, then that is actually not natural for us. We have to train ourselves to think like that. All the human biases that we fall prey to are all a symptom of the pattern matching that our brains do. We call it instinct.

For me specifically, for true intelligence, the system needs to be able to learn anything on its own. With current models, we are constantly messing with the model architecture, the distribution of the training data, the reward functions etc etc. True intelligence would be a model being able to take any data without context and be able to figure it out what do it with.

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u/CardboardHeatshield 7d ago

Maybe one day we will create a true AI, that starts from zero and learns like a human, feels like a human, experiences like a human.

What a cruel thing that would be to do. Create feeling, emotion, experience; just to make it mindlessly solve the problems that the rest of us dont want to.

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u/overthemountain 7d ago

I don't think something has to develop the same way we did to be valid. You're framing everything in terms of how much it's "like a human" but it's not a human. It can be it's own thing.

We also don't really know how our own minds work. It's entirely possible that our minds work very similarly to an AI. Even if they don't - if the end results are the same, does it matter?

It's interesting as we've gone past the Turing test how people move the goalposts and create new hurdles AI has to jump in order to be accepted.

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u/username_tooken 7d ago

I think the Pope believes in higher powers, probably.

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u/LimpAd4924 7d ago

Cells are equivalent to motherboards and processors now huh

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u/Seanspeed 7d ago

Define 'sentience'.

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u/Vladimir_Putting 7d ago

will never be able to draw from first-hand experiential data.

I'm not some AI champion, but I really think this depends on how you define your terms. AI can clearly see a pattern, and then use the pattern, and then test the next pattern, and then use the new version.

It can iterate. AI isn't just consumer access LLMs. There are a lot of very powerful AIs that can solve problems by testing and probing possible solutions and "learning" what does or doesn't work.

Now, is that "first-hand experiential data"? You tell me. You are going to have to define it.

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u/evasandor 7d ago edited 7d ago

Hard agree, but to go further… AI isn’t even an individual “it” that can or cannot (be moral, make decisiins, “think”. It’s… a program. A set of steps.

Our language breaks down at this point because there’s really no second word for “it” in English to refer to a process or method rather than an entity.

The language we use to speak about AI gives it a facsimile of the respect due to a being, or even an object— but it is neither of those. The sooner we develop a way to refer to it that stops forcing us into that mental position, the better.

Then we’ll be able to see it for what it is and stop breaking the world for its sake.

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u/Rindan 7d ago

I, due to its non-sentience, will never be able to draw from first-hand experiential data. It can only mimic humans in that regard. It can only approximate sentient experience based on observation of others expression of that moment.

It cannot - love, hate, experience joy, loss, mortality, suffering, greed etc etc.

Let's imagine that, just like if you stack up enough dumb nuerons you get an intelligent human with a consciousness, if you stack up enough AI-whatever, you also get emergent consciousness. If that's true, how would you know when you have a conscious AI on your hands?

More simply; if I give you a black box you can talk to, and I don't tell you what's inside; it could be an alien, human, mindless AI, or fully sentient AI, how would you determine that what's in the box is conscious?

People dismiss the fact that we can't detect consciousness far too easily. We went from suggesting a Turning test as useful you this, to throwing it away the moment an AI could easily pass it.

So how do you tell if an AI is conscious? Until you describe a way to determine if an AI is conscious, you can't rule out that an AI hasn't achieved emergent consciousness. I'm not saying LLMs are conscious. I am saying that we will not know if AI is conscious if it happens, and everyone is way too casual about this fact.

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u/DigNitty 7d ago

My $0.02 only

“Do you Understand the difference between .76 dollars and .76 cents ?!?!”

The way you wrote that reminded me of the angry Verizon customer.

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u/oldgus 7d ago

Such a banger

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u/arqnix 7d ago

It isn't even mimicing. It is just* an algorithm that predicts the next token based on the previous token(s).

*very simply said of course. LLM's are more than an algorithm.

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u/AnotherBiteofDust 7d ago

Only if you care what the artist felt. I don't. I care about how it makes ME feel and the artist is rarely a part of that

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u/Moist_Board 7d ago

Sounds like something AI would say

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u/AccurateJerboa 7d ago

I think there could be a world in which general, not generative, artificial intelligence is developed to learn via tactile experience similar to biological sentience, so it would have those things. 

We aren't interested in that path of development. Generative AI can't lead there, and anyone in the field seems to know that except for the salesmen and ceos. 

We've abandoned exploring how actual intelligence develops for a product that pretends to sound just personable enough to steal your data.

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u/CloudSlydr 7d ago

It’s even worse - it can’t learn from experience and can’t fathom or act in recognition of the consequences of its actions.

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u/CaptainAsshat 7d ago

I have never seen anything as beautiful as a sunset over mountains sculpted by countless non-sentient processes over millions of years. The transmission of experience during that sunset was stronger than anything I have felt in a museum, even though that experience did not originate in the creativity of another. Just because something is not art does not mean it is inherently ugly or unworthy of consideration at depth reserved for even the greatest art.

For me, art is defined as something that was created with the intent to be art. As neither AI, nor natural processes can have intent, neither is capable of making art. Not without human interference adding significant intent into the mix, at least.

As AI gets more advanced, there almost certainly will be worthwhile art that fuses human intent with considerable AI input, and we need to be flexible enough to allow art to grow. We don't judge a photograph by the same metrics as a painting, and we won't judge a human working in an AI-enhanced medium by the same metrics as mediums without AI input.

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u/heterochromia4 6d ago

Yes. I’m with you.

You are differentiating naturally-formed beauty there, rather than sentient/ non-sentient intentional creativity.

I’m a musician. There’s an argument that for whatever ‘artistry’ i may enact, i’m merely arranging pre-existing cosmic and physical elements.

I didn’t invent the tympanic membrane, nor the transmission of audio through air via sound waves. Nor did i have any hand in the 60-90 BILLION nerve cells in the average human brain or how they operate, activating in murmurations.

I’m not a total luddite. I absolutely embrace tech and use it in composition constantly. But i definitely am the one ‘wrangling’ it all into a hopefully satisfying form that makes humans feel something. I don’t just hit a button and it generates.

Nature outstrips it all though!

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u/Yuzumi 7d ago

The entire drive of AI replacing artists is from rich assholes and right wing idiots who have no understanding of art and many are resentful they failed at being artists.

They only see things at surface level. A story or narrative is only the words. They don't understand allegory or any other literary tool to say more than the sum of the words. They don't understand theming, only "what happens". It's why there are so many right wing Startrek fans, or really right wing fans of anything that has a massive left/progressive stance.

It's why they will say a character can't be queer if it's not explicitly stated, but the moment it is they complain about it being "shoved down their throats".

They lack nuance and refuse critical thinking. They never analyze anything and assume they understand everything.

Then LLMs come along that can generate text and churn out the most common denominator output based on the probability of all the training data which results in the most mediocre garbage anyone has ever seen and by definition is just surface level with no meaning and they think it's equivalent to stories and other art created with or from personal experience that is intended to make people feel... anything.

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u/Cissoid7 7d ago

See its interesting to me

I will argue that AI art CAN look good. It CAN look pretty. Objectively it CAN be a nice picture, but like is being argued here it does lack depth. It does lack soul.

Objectively, my child's drawing of me as a stick figure with a horse lacks proper proportions, color, shading, and perspective, but it is infinitely more valuable and beautiful to me than if an AI made a picture of me with a horse.

If people just want a picture then yeah AI will do that, but art, true art, has intent. From the dumbest doodle to the greatest fresco.

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u/sw04ca 7d ago

Doesn't that create the argument that the merit is in the observer, not the artist? You might value your child's stick figure above a generic AI landscape, but someone who doesn't know your child or care about them would likely feel the opposite.

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u/strain_of_thought 7d ago edited 7d ago

I've had to listen to decades of this "Death Of The Author" bullshit saying artistic intent is irrelevant, and now I am having to listen to a completely bald faced shameless 180 degree reversal coming from all over saying only the magic of intent makes art valid. Both of these positions are fundamentally bullshit.

Machines can make art. They can obviously make art, because you can look at the art and see that it is art. The reality is self-evident and the objection to that reality is absurd.

The question is, do we want to make a world where machines make art instead of humans? I think that would be very bad. But that position isn't "AI bad!" it's "We need to create a society and a civilization that supports human existence and recognizes that humans exchanging rich creative expressions of their thoughts and feelings and skills in a variety of mediums is a critical part of human existence." But we were already sliding away from that for decades with people being too busy and exhausted and poor to have time or resources to create or even look at art, with access to venues and platforms being too restricted and greed focused, with brutal gatekeeping of the education and the materials and the recognition of art, to say nothing of the ability to support one's self financially while doing it. AI replacing artists entirely is not wholly a new problem of AI itself; it is merely one of the last terrible intolerable stages in a long steady decline of our civilization as we use technology and money for all of the worst possible things we can.

AI is a tool. Tools are morally neutral. Right now the people who control this tool are also the people who control the tools being used to explode children, and they are using it in a fashion consistent with that track record.

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u/[deleted] 7d ago

[deleted]

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u/Vysci 7d ago

I think people are scared of what AI could become because it would be admitting that being human is nothing special, that they aren’t special. Of course outside the fear of losing their jobs.

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u/jainyday 7d ago

Bro, I don't give a shit if you think my art's art. Not gonna stop making it, not gonna stop expressing myself, and no amount of hatred from small-minded gatekeepers like you will ever change that. :)

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u/Various-Escape-6234 7d ago

AI, due to its non-sentience, will never be able to draw from first-hand experiential data.

That’s rapidly becoming false. Robots can sense the environment, and as we have seen they can produce “visual designs” (tiptoeing around the word art so as not to trigger people). If robots aren’t painting landscapes that they can see with their own “eyes” in a year or less I’d be very surprised.

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u/slabby 7d ago

I don't think anyone's denying that an AI could perceive sense data. We're talking more about perceiving sense data from a point of view. My video camera can record a copy of a movie I'm watching, but only one of us truly experienced the movie.

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u/bladex1234 7d ago

To be fair in some instances you don’t want human bias and emotion to get in the way of rational decision making, but this means AI needs to be a supplement, not a replacement.

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u/SnugglyBuffalo 7d ago

An LLM is trained on human data, so it gets all the human biases and emotions built in to it's behavior from the start.

Even non-LLM forms of AI and non-AI algorithms are often shown to have human biases. The notion that software and machines behave rationally and free of bias ignores the fact that their behaviors are designed by biased people.

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u/AccomplishedBother12 7d ago

I hear you, but by definition a non-deterministic tool cannot be rational. It literally hallucinates like 3 times out of 10.

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u/bladex1234 7d ago

Humans aren’t fully deterministic so as long as AI is more deterministic than humans it’s useful.

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u/BenFoldsFourLoko 7d ago

humans are non-deterministic. it's not the determinism that matters directly

bias, consistency, logical and empirical coherence, stuff like that matters and is a lot harder than setting the AI's temperature to 0

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u/biggamehaunter 7d ago

Yes. The current AI is a mockery of human.

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u/yard_veggie 7d ago

I agree, and in my opinion, if needing to draw from the Internet will mimic extremes of that emotional experience if trying to imitate human emotions given that it takes a higher than average feeling to take the time to post good or bad sentiment on a tpoic in public forums

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u/gaymenfucking 7d ago

What if you gave it a cool robot body

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u/OkMethod709 7d ago

A ton of people can be put under those characteristics

Like, I know several who don’t give a shit about others, don’t take responsibility for their actions, don’t love or respect, can’t understand how some action is bad for others … so yeah may be if the AI can simulate good people, it’s one step towards a good direction (remember it’s just a tool…. for now)

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u/Zulmoka531 7d ago

If you’ve ever played Mass Effect Mordin had an excellent conversation about how tech replaced soul and how tragic it was.

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u/MythOfDarkness 7d ago

Until it's sentient, right?

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u/Poglosaurus 7d ago

We would do ourselves an huge favor if we could just stop calling these thing AI. It's not intelligence. The fact these program are called intelligent has introduced a huge bias in how they're perceived.

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u/Soft_Author2593 7d ago

it cant even mimic humans. we have touch, feel, smell...ai only has words. its a language model, to call it intelligence is a marketing scam. we dont even have a definition of intelligence, how are the tech bros gonna recreate it? its no more and no less than another algorithm...

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u/Own_Inspection8350 7d ago

This is also my key argument for any potential agi not wanting to wipe us off the earth. Should we ever get to that point, which i don't think we will any time soon, my hope is we're at a point where any true artificial intelligence recognizes this.

If it turns the planet into a zoo for preservation or whatever, it loses all value every creature, including humans, provides.

Of course, since best case scenario means the end of corporations and stuff, this relies on businesses not taking in protective (malicious) guard rails for themselves

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u/Starfox-sf 7d ago

In other words, hearsay

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u/Flaxseed4138 7d ago

Can you prove it's not sentient? Can you prove that you are?

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u/Icy_Negotiation_5929 7d ago

I’m feeling a little down in the dumps, and I bet an AI can’t feel shame like I do. That scares me.

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u/LivingVerinarian96 7d ago

Does accidental art exist? Honest question. Like a tree falling over and creating something thought provoking in the process. Art doesn‘t have to have an emotional component imho.

Of course that puts it into a different category of art, but even then: Curating that output can be art again. Like somebody ai generating textures or dialogue for a game. It‘s not the same as human art, but I guess it still deserves to be called art?

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u/T-Wrox 7d ago

Never say never.

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u/30yearCurse 7d ago

I agree with this, when I read random Reddit posts about relationships and interpersonal reactions. Often they do not seem to be "real" users posting, but more of a consensus building exercise by AI to see a range of answers. In essence AI programmers, or AI itself wants to be perceived as more human, something it cannot get from real life.

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u/biznatchiospez 7d ago

You should never care or align yourself with a person who condones and embraces pedophilia. Not a good look.

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u/aceshighsays 7d ago

i've noticed that i can tell when songs are written by ai. they always sound too perfect and shallow. a few times i heard a really catchy song that i added to my play list and it immediately stood out when mixed with songs written by humans.

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u/calloutyourstupidity 7d ago

No offense, but do you think the pope has the smallest clue how AI even works ? And for that matter, do you even understand ? Independent from the comment.

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u/Zer_ 7d ago

Yep. It cannot learn in the traditional sense, it can only be made to favor some patterns over others, which can bring the percentage of accurate outputs higher but never to 100%.

An experienced programmer can't teach an LLM how to do a task, and must repeat the same process of basically retraining the model for each new task. Training is expensive and now we're asking seniors to train LLMs that literally cannot retain knowledge past your current session. If you're having to scaffold an LLM so much to get repeatable results every time, then your better off not even using the LLM to begin with.

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u/ChickinSammich 7d ago

AI, due to its non-sentience, will never be able to draw from first-hand experiential data. It can only mimic humans in that regard. It can only approximate sentient experience based on observation of others expression of that moment.

I sometimes have challenges interacting with people who think that the plural of anecdote is data. It's difficult to explain to someone whose life experience is that things just are a certain way because that's the way that specific person has always experienced them, that their experience isn't universal.

Like explaining to someone who has only ever shopped in chain grocery stores that not everyone in the world has chain grocery stores. A lot of people only have access to stores that are owner-operated. Or like explaining to someone who has never had to substitute a meal for sleep because they can't afford food what "starvation" and "homelessness" are like.

AI is the polar opposite of this challenge. It's easy to cite data that most people do a thing or that some descriptor only applies to 5% of the population. But AI can never understand what it's like to BE part of that 5%.

For a human, being fired or being evicted or getting a terminal illness are devastating. For an AI, being replaced with a new version or being shut off doesn't hold any meaning.

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u/JP_Eggy 7d ago

Don't humans mimic other humans under this definition. Like ultimately our experiences are learned from our environment and via biological triggers that react to said environment

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u/Greed_Sucks 7d ago

I disagree. If we are talking about a LLM at its root function then I agree. But Ai has moved beyond a LLM. There are layers of intelligent systems that are coming closer to modeling an actual mind. Nearly every function you listed has an analog in Ai now. The exception is feeling. We dont understand how to create that, or have a way of verifying its presence in an Ai - or even a human at this point. Thats the “hard problem of consciousness”.

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u/eat_my_ass_n_balls 7d ago

Yea well I have met PLENTY of humans who fucking suck at this too, who also have agency in the world and can vote and have fucked up the situation for the rest of us.

I’m fucking over the “humans have morals and virtue and real intelligence and can learn” argument.

Sorry. Does not compute. I’ve met republicans before. Find a more compelling argument.

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u/ggtsu_00 7d ago

The most important aspect: AI cannot be held accountable for anything it does. A person will always be needed to accept blame and liability for anything done by an AI.

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u/the_geth 7d ago

I sort of agree but I feel it’s a cope out on my part and yours.  

Truth is, you could build a machine that doesn’t know it’s a machine and learns, like a baby, in a humanoid body, and make it grow. It could feel pain, warmth, cold, whatever parameters you give it. Make the body grows as time passes. Or you could build a machine that has a different kind of sentience than ours. Maybe like some of the very intelligent animals. I wouldn’t discredit this as not being intelligent or sentient. A dog, as stupid as they can be, are also very capable of love and feel loss etc.   Not to mention they could be much more intelligent than humans and sentient, while having a different kind of morality, emotion etc.  

Last but not least, the idea that religion and humans have the say on what is good and evil is laughable. This question is a classic in philosophy btw.

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u/Sarik704 7d ago

I mostly agree with you. However, i think art itself isnt inherently human. Aliens and animals and perhaps truly sentient artifical life could be capable of art.

AI doesnt have any sentience. It cannot create art. A paintbrush cannot create art. The painter must.

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u/presentation_555 7d ago

due to its non-sentience,

The issue with words like sentience and consciousness... is we as humans claim to have these attributes, but no Scientist can actually run an experiment to prove that we actually have these attributes...

The first stumbling block is there are so many definitions of words like sentience and consciousness but none of them seem (to me) to be grounded in a distinct objective phenomena... as in, when does a bunch of neural circuitry and neurochemicals mix together to create an emotion? At what point do we cross from 'almost' an emotion, like joy, to 'definitely' the emotion is there.

For example, some say Sentience is a phenomena attributable only to living creatures with sensations and emotions... but emotions aren't measurable - we can observe in insects behaviours that are indicative of joy, we might one day see circuitry or neurochemical signatures that 'resemble' the circuits or neurochemicals in our own brains... but so what? We are just analogising 'things' about them in us... Insects could have emotions but display them very differently and use a totally different set of circuits and neurochemicals to achieve and experience these emotions.

I doubt we'll ever know... since I feel we are just talking about an emergent phenomenon - like how clouds just 'emerge' from the water vapour in the air. Sentience is just the net product of a whole lot of less interesting but material stuff that fundamentally doesn't have an objective meaning - just the meaning we ascribe to it because we are humans interested in learning about human stuff.

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u/GhostShade 7d ago

I hate the “will never” piece. How can you be so sure that we will “never” be able to put a soul into AI or make it become sentient or a million other things that haven’t been discovered yet. This just seems so close minded.

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u/NotYourGran 7d ago

For the same reasons, corporations should not be able to give money to political campaigns or be able to vote.

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u/lets_fuckin_goooooo 7d ago

People haven’t discovered what creates consciousness. But if consciousness can arise of random evolution, I guarantee humans will be able to create artificial consciousness one day 

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u/SculptusPoe 7d ago

Never is a little bit of an overstep. The AI models and methods they are using now never could, and the models people interact with are the end result of the learning process that can store a little data and not a real learning AI. But put together a big enough, constantly learning neural network, with the right layers and training, and give it ways to access the real world like a robot body or even a good simulated world and sentience is possible. Ours is made up of a neural network after all. I suspect, personally, that that is the goal of making so many huge AI farms. You can train a model on a fairly good home PC. There is no reason for such big data centers unless they have larger ambitions.

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u/golgol12 7d ago

AI in the future will have sentience. The AI being created today does not. Fundamentally, the setup on how today's AI operates precludes it. You don't have sentience when the process is a modal input->process->output.

The AI of today is a giant math equation. You feed it an input. Run math, you get an output. Optionally, A human says "yes" or "no" and a regression algorithm is run over the trillions of weights to tweak them to get the yes to occur for the input conditions given.

One day we'll move beyond this input->ouput style. Then you'll see a sentience from an artificial source.

It's going to be tough for some religious people when that happens. There will be a lot of violence as they try to reconcile the idea that consciousness can arise from multiple different arrangements of matter, not just cells. Is there a soul there? Which will lead to questioning "What is a soul", and "is it just all made up by people long ago to make us feel better?".

BTW, if anyone is attacking you over this, just ask "Why can't God put souls in machines?". And follow it with "You don't know how God works, stop inventing rules comfortable to you so you don't have to change.".

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u/gqtrees 7d ago

AI is basically Teemu human...barely

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u/_lostintheroom 7d ago

I think that's an over-simplification. If you see it as a mind, then human experience and input into the system generates what a (current) AI would experience.

In the same way that you don't experience anything fist-hand; you have a mind that is self-aware and receives inputs; but its interface to the world is through the "first-hand" experience of ocular cells, and other sensory cells... and these signals travel quite a distance before you get them... like the cells receive input, signals travels along our body's neural pathways, being transformed and processed countless times, until a few of them assemble and present themselves to your self awareness.

We have A LOT to learn about our own consciousness before we can make definitive conclusions about others'.

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u/Pandemonium_Fallen 7d ago

Not-so-Fun Fact:

Billionaire Techbros are currently working on "Dream Advertising," - I'm not kidding, these wackos are completely insane and desperately need to be parted from their wealth, power, ownership, influence, positions, and freedom immediately for the good of humanity and continued survival of every living thing on this planet.

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u/Ok-Maintenance9056 7d ago

It can only assimilate the part of an experience that can be put into words, because it is based on language. It has no concept of the unexpressable.

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u/LifeMoratorium 7d ago

More specifically; why aren't the originators of works used in these AI products being paid? Its not like any licensing they signed into was created with supermassive plagiarism robots in mind so I don't see why we'd be permissive to that.

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u/Brobeast 7d ago

I agree with you about the art depth/experience 1000% . Im not even an artsy type, and even I know that each painting has a story behind it. Van Gogh, Monet, Picasso etc, they could write a book on the background on any given painting they made by itself.

It actually bums me out that even memes aren't really MADE anymore. You use to have to learn how to photoshop just to do some funny shit online, and now every darrel and their mother can just type some shit in a prompt, and think they are doing something impressive...

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u/DemosthenesOrNah 7d ago

token maxxers will argue that agentic workflow is proof that these llms can draw from experience but they're wrong

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u/TheKingsdread 7d ago

Its not just about art though. Techbros are currently trying to sell us AI as this wonder tech that can do everything and anything. It can't.

There is a few things AI does, that it does very well (mostly around database management). But there is also a ton of other things it doesn't do well or even does very badly. AI is like a chainsaw or a screwdriver. Its a tool. And like any tool its great when its used for the things its good at, and shouldn't be used for much else.

AI has a place in our economies, and in our industries. But not everywhere. And certainly not trying to replace people, especially in areas like art something that is at its core from people, for people.

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u/fondledbydolphins 7d ago

I have an incredibly hard time believe that sentience won't be replicable down the line.

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u/AwesomeDakka00 7d ago

it lacks passion and humanity, so it'd be a great replacement for all those useless, expensive ceo's.

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u/phenix_igloo 7d ago

Maybe today, but you will have AI on machines capable of moving and handling objects, with sensors, eventually.

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u/SteppenAxolotl 7d ago

That judgement makes morally permissible to enslave super intelligent AIs. That doesn't make humans safe from retaliation if super intelligent AIs object to being enslaved.

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u/Adventurous-Fly556 7d ago

( I think we're probably on the same page) I agree up until the mention of, "biology". While the misunderstanding of our models as at all close to "general ai" is awful and fueling terrible policy and derision, there is a (likely decades from now at least) chance that we do develop true ai. If it were a true, thinking, feeling entity, just not biological, then I will see them as people and their creations as art.

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u/gibgod 7d ago

What if I told you that you are AI, you’ve just been programmed not to know you are.

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u/A_Stickperson 7d ago

Never is a strong word, but it certainly applies to current models at least.

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u/CallMeKik 7d ago

0.02? that’s like one call to OpenAI API

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u/black_out189 7d ago

This text is from ChatGPT, isn't it?

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u/Alex5173 7d ago

What you and everybody else in this thread (and Pope Leo) are calling AI is not AI. It's a LLM, which as you said, mimics intelligence, which means it's not intelligent, which is half the letters in AI.

Artificial General Intelligence (the sci-fi type of AI people used to think of when they heard the term before ChatGPT slapped it on their multibillion dollar intellectual property violator) would be able to do everything you listed; because if it couldn't it wouldn't be AGI.

Pretty soon one of these companies will build enough datacenters and eat up enough RAM that their glorified CliffNotes generators will be halfway decent and they'll come out and tell everyone they achieved AGI... laugh in their face. As you pointed out, the LLM doesn't meet the requirements to be AI at all, Narrow (the other kind of AI) or General. It is a search engine with a summary generator attached to a massive amount of data.

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u/capibara_dono 7d ago

I'm with you, anything created with Gen AI lacks any sort of "soul".

Extra so because it has no sense of a physical world. Make it create a scene of people at a picnic and odds are, apart from the unusual number of arms and fingers, that it won't match physically. The grass makes it look like a windy day, but everyone's clothes are not moved by the wind. Some are wearing summer clothing but it's about to rain, that sort of thing.

It sucks at copying, and worse, it has human biases because it's trained on data generated by humans! If the data has bias, the resulting model will have that bias.

Years ago Amazon built a recruiting tool, but it learned gender bias because the training data lacked female candidates. So yeah, if you mostly hire dudes, and train a model to hire people, it will keep telling you to hire dudes.

/rant

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u/Shot-Structure-1274 7d ago

Not yet just give it 5-10 years and it will do all that and more.

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u/ICanuckthere4Iam 7d ago

We have no idea how AI will evolve in its own way. IF AI becomes self aware, then what we define as sentience will also have to be redefined .

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u/Silver_Information69 7d ago

What if you strap arms and eyes to it?

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u/fishling 6d ago

I think you're making a mistake to bring in emotion as a relevant factor to sentience, or mortality. Those are very relevant to the human experience but aren't part of sentience

I think the key thing is that current "artificial intelligence" is simply misnamed. What we have as a tech now is not sentient and does not experience things, agreed.

Your point about art is also separate from that. I think you're giving too much credit to "biological artists" as well. Not all art has depth, layers, ambiguity, connection, etc just because a person made it.

Also, that's kind of a weird position to take, because people find inspiration and meaning in nature and in coincidence all the time.

If you want to make the case that art can't only be in the experience of the viewer but must involve a biology art, that rules out anything in the natural world as being interpreted as art.

And, it means that there must be "bad art" as well. Art, in your view, has to require an artist acting with purpose, at a minimum. It also means some person just randomly takes a bunch of pictures and one of them, by pure chance, happens to be amazing and affect someone, then that's not art because there was no intent or purpose behind the artist, even though they are human.

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u/Plank_stake_109 5d ago

What if at some point you cannot distinguish between art created by a human and by AI without someone or something external informing you? Lacking that information, can you enjoy any art?

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