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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.

https://archive.ph/Fapar

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[-] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 63 points 4 weeks ago

Good luck. Even David Attenborrough can't help but anthropomorphize. People will feel sorry for a picture of a dot separated from a cluster of other dots. The play by AI companies is that it's human nature for us to want to give just about every damn thing human qualities. I'd explain more but as I write this my smoke alarm is beeping a low battery warning, and I need to go put the poor dear out of its misery.

[-] audaxdreik@pawb.social 28 points 4 weeks ago

This is the current problem with "misalignment". It's a real issue, but it's not "AI lying to prevent itself from being shut off" as a lot of articles tend to anthropomorphize it. The issue is (generally speaking) it's trying to maximize a numerical reward by providing responses to people that they find satisfactory. A legion of tech CEOs are flogging the algorithm to do just that, and as we all know, most people don't actually want to hear the truth. They want to hear what they want to hear.

LLMs are a poor stand in for actual AI, but they are at least proficient at the actual thing they are doing. Which leads us to things like this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKCynxiV_8I

[-] paraphrand@lemmy.world 13 points 4 weeks ago

I’m still sad about that dot. 😥

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[-] Geodad@lemmy.world 62 points 4 weeks ago

I've never been fooled by their claims of it being intelligent.

Its basically an overly complicated series of if/then statements that try to guess the next series of inputs.

[-] kromem@lemmy.world 31 points 3 weeks ago

It very much isn't and that's extremely technically wrong on many, many levels.

Yet still one of the higher up voted comments here.

Which says a lot.

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[-] Flagstaff@programming.dev 23 points 4 weeks ago

ChatGPT 2 was literally an Excel spreadsheet.

I guesstimate that it's effectively a supermassive autocomplete algo that uses some TOTP-like factor to help it produce "unique" output every time.

And they're running into issues due to increasingly ingesting AI-generated data.

Get your popcorn out! 🍿

[-] aesthelete@lemmy.world 25 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

I really hate the current AI bubble but that article you linked about "chatgpt 2 was literally an Excel spreadsheet" isn't what the article is saying at all.

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[-] anzo@programming.dev 16 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

I love this resource, https://thebullshitmachines.com/ (i.e. see lesson 1)..

In a series of five- to ten-minute lessons, we will explain what these machines are, how they work, and how to thrive in a world where they are everywhere.

You will learn when these systems can save you a lot of time and effort. You will learn when they are likely to steer you wrong. And you will discover how to see through the hype to tell the difference. ..

Also, Anthropic (ironically) has some nice paper(s) about the limits of "reasoning" in AI.

[-] benni@lemmy.world 55 points 3 weeks ago

I think we should start by not following this marketing speak. The sentence "AI isn't intelligent" makes no sense. What we mean is "LLMs aren't intelligent".

[-] innermachine@lemmy.world 20 points 3 weeks ago

So couldn't we say LLM's aren't really AI? Cuz that's what I've seen to come to terms with.

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[-] undeffeined@lemmy.ml 13 points 3 weeks ago

I make the point to allways refer to it as LLM exactly to make the point that it's not an Inteligence.

[-] guyoverthere123@lemmy.dbzer0.com 42 points 3 weeks ago

Anyone pretending AI has intelligence is a fucking idiot.

[-] MangoCats@feddit.it 9 points 3 weeks ago

AI is not actual intelligence. However, it can produce results better than a significant number of professionally employed people...

I am reminded of when word processors came out and "administrative assistant" dwindled as a role in mid-level professional organizations, most people - even increasingly medical doctors these days - do their own typing. The whole "typing pool" concept has pretty well dried up.

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[-] aceshigh@lemmy.world 30 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I’m neurodivergent, I’ve been working with AI to help me learn about myself and how I think. It’s been exceptionally helpful. A human wouldn’t have been able to help me because I don’t use my senses or emotions like everyone else, and I didn’t know it... AI excels at mirroring and support, which was exactly missing from my life. I can see how this could go very wrong with certain personalities…

E: I use it to give me ideas that I then test out solo.

[-] PushButton@lemmy.world 37 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

That sounds fucking dangerous... You really should consult a HUMAN expert about your problem, not an algorithm made to please the interlocutor...

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[-] Snapz@lemmy.world 31 points 3 weeks ago

This is very interesting... because the general saying is that AI is convincing for non experts in the field it's speaking about. So in your specific case, you are actually saying that you aren't an expert on yourself, therefore the AI's assessment is convincing to you. Not trying to upset, it's genuinely fascinating how that theory is true here as well.

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[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 26 points 3 weeks ago

The other thing that most people don't focus on is how we train LLMs.

We're basically building something like a spider tailed viper. A spider tailed viper is a kind of snake that has a growth on its tail that looks a lot like a spider. It wiggles it around so it looks like a spider, convincing birds they've found a snack, and when the bird gets close enough the snake strikes and eats the bird.

Now, I'm not saying we're building something that is designed to kill us. But, I am saying that we're putting enormous effort into building something that can fool us into thinking it's intelligent. We're not trying to build something that can do something intelligent. We're instead trying to build something that mimics intelligence.

What we're effectively doing is looking at this thing that mimics a spider, and trying harder and harder to tweak its design so that it looks more and more realistic. What's crazy about that is that we're not building this to fool a predator so that we're not in danger. We're not doing it to fool prey, so we can catch and eat them more easily. We're doing it so we can fool ourselves.

It's like if, instead of a spider-tailed snake, a snake evolved a bird-like tail, and evolution kept tweaking the design so that the tail was more and more likely to fool the snake so it would bite its own tail. Except, evolution doesn't work like that because a snake that ignored actual prey and instead insisted on attacking its own tail would be an evolutionary dead end. Only a truly stupid species like humans would intentionally design something that wasn't intelligent but mimicked intelligence well enough that other humans preferred it to actual information and knowledge.

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[-] scarabic@lemmy.world 25 points 3 weeks ago

My thing is that I don’t think most humans are much more than this. We too regurgitate what we have absorbed in the past. Our brains are not hard logic engines but “best guess” boxes and they base those guesses on past experience and probability of success. We make choices before we are aware of them and then apply rationalizations after the fact to back them up - is that true “reasoning?”

It’s similar to the debate about self driving cars. Are they perfectly safe? No, but have you seen human drivers???

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[-] RalphWolf@lemmy.world 25 points 4 weeks ago

Steve Gibson on his podcast, Security Now!, recently suggested that we should call it "Simulated Intelligence". I tend to agree.

[-] goondaba@lemmy.world 10 points 4 weeks ago

I’ve taken to calling it Automated Inference

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[-] bbb@sh.itjust.works 22 points 4 weeks ago

This article is written in such a heavy ChatGPT style that it's hard to read. Asking a question and then immediately answering it? That's AI-speak.

[-] sobchak@programming.dev 17 points 4 weeks ago

And excessive use of em-dashes, which is the first thing I look for. He does say he uses LLMs a lot.

[-] bbb@sh.itjust.works 18 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

"…" (Unicode U+2026 Horizontal Ellipsis) instead of "..." (three full stops), and using them unnecessarily, is another thing I rarely see from humans.

Edit: Huh. Lemmy automatically changed my three fulls stops to the Unicode character. I might be wrong on this one.

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[-] JackbyDev@programming.dev 12 points 3 weeks ago

Asking a question and then immediately answering it? That's AI-speak.

HA HA HA HA. I UNDERSTOOD THAT REFERENCE. GOOD ONE. 🤖

[-] Bogasse@lemmy.ml 21 points 3 weeks ago

The idea that RAGs "extend their memory" is also complete bullshit. We literally just finally build working search engine, but instead of using a nice interface for it we only let chatbots use them.

[-] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 20 points 4 weeks ago

People who don't like "AI" should check out the newsletter and / or podcast of Ed Zitron. He goes hard on the topic.

[-] kibiz0r@midwest.social 19 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Citation Needed (by Molly White) also frequently bashes AI.

I like her stuff because, no matter how you feel about crypto, AI, or other big tech, you can never fault her reporting. She steers clear of any subjective accusations or prognostication.

It’s all “ABC person claimed XYZ thing on such and such date, and then 24 hours later submitted a report to the FTC claiming the exact opposite. They later bought $5 million worth of Trumpcoin, and two weeks later the FTC announced they were dropping the lawsuit.”

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[-] hera@feddit.uk 16 points 4 weeks ago

Philosophers are so desperate for humans to be special. How is outputting things based on things it has learned any different to what humans do?

We observe things, we learn things and when required we do or say things based on the things we observed and learned. That's exactly what the AI is doing.

I don't think we have achieved "AGI" but I do think this argument is stupid.

[-] counterspell@lemmy.world 15 points 4 weeks ago

No it’s really not at all the same. Humans don’t think according to the probabilities of what is the likely best next word.

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[-] aesthelete@lemmy.world 13 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

How is outputting things based on things it has learned any different to what humans do?

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.

[-] kibiz0r@midwest.social 9 points 4 weeks ago

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.

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[-] middlemanSI@lemmy.world 11 points 4 weeks ago

Most people, evidently including you, can only ever recycle old ideas. Like modern "AI". Some of us can concieve new ideas.

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[-] Angelusz@lemmy.world 15 points 4 weeks ago

Super duper shortsighted article.

I mean, sure, some points are valid. But there's not just programmers involved, other professions such as psychologists and Philosophers and artists, doctors etc. too.

And I agree AGI probably won't emerge from binary systems. However... There's quantum computing on the rise. Latest theories of the mind and consciousness discuss how consciousness and our minds in general also appear to work with quantum states.

Finally, if biofeedback would be the deciding factor.. That can be simulated, modeled after a sample of humans.

The article is just doomsday hoo ha, unbalanced.

Show both sides of the coin...

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[-] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 13 points 4 weeks ago

Artificial Intelligent is supposed to be intelligent.

Calling LLMs intelligent is where it's wrong.

[-] Endmaker@ani.social 15 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Artificial Intelligent is supposed to be intelligent.

For the record, AI is not supposed to be intelligent.

It just has to appear intelligent. It can be all smoke-and-mirrors, giving the impression that it's smart enough - provided it can perform the task at hand.

That's why it's termed artificial intelligence.

The subfield of Artificial General Intelligence is another story.

[-] nickhammes@lemmy.world 9 points 4 weeks ago

The field of artificial intelligence has also made incredible strides in the last decade, and the decade before that. The field of artificial general intelligence has been around for something like 70 years, and has made a really modest amount of progress in that time, on the scale of what they're trying to do.

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[-] confuser@lemmy.zip 11 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

The thing is, ai is compression of intelligence but not intelligence itself. That's the part that confuses people. Ai is the ability to put anything describable into a compressed zip.

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[-] ShotDonkey@lemmy.world 11 points 4 weeks ago

I disagree with this notion. I think it's dangerously unresponsible to only assume AI is stupid. Everyone should also assume that with a certain probabilty AI can become dangerously self aware. I revcommend everyone to read what Daniel Kokotaijlo, previous employees of OpenAI, predicts: https://ai-2027.com/

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[-] fodor@lemmy.zip 10 points 3 weeks ago

Mind your pronouns, my dear. "We" don't do that shit because we know better.

[-] Nomad@infosec.pub 9 points 4 weeks ago

I think most people tend to overlook the most obvious advantages and are overly focused on what is supposed to be and marketed as.

No need to think how to feed a thing into google to get a decent starting point for reading. No finding the correct terminology before finding the thing you are looking for. Just ask like you would ask a knowledgeable individual and you get an overview of what you wanted to ask in the first place.

Discuss a little to get the options and then start reading and researching the everliving shit out of them to confirm all the details.

[-] grabyourmotherskeys@lemmy.world 12 points 4 weeks ago

Agreed.

When I was a kid we went to the library. If a card catalog didn't yield the book you needed, you asked the librarian. They often helped. No one sat around after the library wondering if the librarian was "truly intelligent".

These are tools. Tools slowly get better. Is a tool make life easier or your work better, you'll eventually use it.

Yes, there are woodworkers that eschew power tools but they are not typical. They have a niche market, and that's great, but it's a choice for the maker and user of their work.

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[-] FourWaveforms@lemm.ee 8 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Another article written by a person who doesn't realize that human intelligence is 100% about predicting sequences of things (including words), and therefore has only the most nebulous idea of how to tell the difference between an LLM and a person.

The result is a lot of uninformed flailing and some pithy statements. You can predict how the article is going to go just from the headline because it's the same article you already read countless times.

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.

May as well have written "Durrrrrrrrrrrrrrr brghlgbhfblrghl." It didn't even occur to the author to ask, "what is thinking? what is reasoning?" The point was to write another junk article to get ad views. There is nothing of substance in it.

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this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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