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.
Humans are not probabilistic, predictive chat models. If you think reasoning is taking a series of inputs, and then echoing the most common of those as output then you mustn’t reason well or often.
If you were born during the first industrial revolution, then you’d think the mind was a complicated machine. People seem to always anthropomorphize inventions of the era.
This is great
Do you think most people reason well?
The answer is why AI is so convincing.
I think people are easily fooled. I mean look at the president.
When you typed this response, you were acting as a probabilistic, predictive chat model. You predicted the most likely effective sequence of words to convey ideas. You did this using very different circuitry, but the underlying strategy was the same.
By this logic we never came up with anything new ever, which is easily disproved if you take two seconds and simply look at the world around you. We made all of this from nothing and it wasn’t a probabilistic response.
Your lack of creativity is not a universal, people create new things all of the time, and you simply cannot program ingenuity or inspiration.
I wasn’t, and that wasn’t my process at all. Go touch grass.
I would rather smoke it than merely touch it, brother sir
Then, unfortunately, you’re even less self-aware than the average LLM chatbot.
Dude chatbots lie about their “internal reasoning process” because they don’t really have one.
Writing is an offshoot of verbal language, which during construction for people almost always has more to do with sound and personal style than the popularity of words. It’s not uncommon to bump into individuals that have a near singular personal grammar and vocabulary and that speak and write completely differently with a distinct style of their own. Also, people are terrible at probabilities.
As a person, I can also learn a fucking concept and apply it without having to have millions of examples of it in my “training data”. Because I’m a person not a fucking statistical model.
But you know, you have to leave your house, touch grass, and actually listen to some people speak that aren’t talking heads on television in order to discover that truth.
Is that why you love saying touch grass so much? Because it’s your own personal style and not because you think it’s a popular thing to say?
Or is it because you learned the fucking concept and not because it’s been expressed too commonly in your “training data”? Honestly, it just sounds like you’ve heard too many people use that insult successfully and now you can’t help but probabilistically express it after each comment lol.
Maybe stop parroting other people and projecting that onto me and maybe you’d sound more convincing.
In this discussion, it’s a personal style thing combined with a desire to irritate you and your fellow “people are chatbots” dorks and based upon the downvotes I’d say it’s working.
And that irritation you feel is a step on the path to enlightenment if only you’d keep going down the path. I know why I’m irritated with your arguments: they’re reductive, degrading, and dehumanizing. Do you know why you’re so irritated with mine? Could it maybe be because it causes you to doubt your techbro mission statement bullshit a little?
Who’s a techbro, the fact that you can’t even have a discussion without resorting to repeating a meme two comments in a row and accusing someone with a label so you can stop thinking critically is really funny.
Is it techbro of me to think that pushing AI into every product is stupid? Is it tech bro of me to not assume immediately that humans are so much more special than simply organic thinking machines? You say I’m being reductive, degrading, and dehumanising, but that’s all simply based on your insecurity.
I was simply being realistic based on the little we know of the human brain and how it works, it is pretty much that until we discover this special something that makes you think we’re better than other neural networks. Without this discovery, your insistence is based on nothing more than your own desire to feel special.
Yep, that’s a bingo!
Humans are absolutely more special than organic thinking machines. I’ll go a step further and say all living creatures are more special than that.
There’s a much more interesting discussion to be had than “humans are basically chatbot” but it’s this line of thinking that I find irritating.
If humans are simply thought processes or our productive output then once you have a machine capable of thinking similarly (btw chatbots aren’t that and likely never will be) then you can feel free to dispose of humanity. It’s a nice precursor to damning humanity to die so that you can have your robot army take over the world.