this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
159 points (88.4% liked)
Technology
84769 readers
3607 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
LLMs/Chatbots confabulate statistically probable texts, there's no compassion possible.
Don't fall into the AI-marketing trap of "we don't know what's happening in the black box, so we have to assume there's consciousness in there". The systems produce convincing deceptive language, but all signs of intelligence or compassion anyone sees in them is just an anthropomorphic projection.
This is a semantic argument, they obviously mean it emulates compassion better than a real human, and given its issue with sycophancy this is undoubtedly true, even to a fault. There's no need to do this every time someone says an ai thinks or does some humany thing, everyone gets it, the language for saying these things is just clunky.
How is it a semantic argument? They're talking about how LLMs work on a functional level, not arguing the meaning of compassion itself. It's not hard to say that they emulate compassion and intelligence relatively well, applying human adjectives without any nuance just opens it up to being misinterpreted by people who don't know any better.
It's semantic because it's really about language. Who cares that it's not doing that like a human would, everyone who knows anything knows that and they were clearly using language in a less cumbersome way.
yes, everyone already knows what you're saying, but it doesn't matter and serves no purpose other than making it difficult to talk about their behaviours. The only workaround for this would be inventing new terms for when an ai does a behavior that resembles a human one. It'd be very cumbersome and add no value to any conversation.
This is assuming that the average person has a solid grasp of the inner workings of an LLM, which unfortunately isn't the case. Regardless, it would only be a semantic argument if they were shifting the meanings of the relevant words to support their argument, which they evidently weren't doing here.
LLMs don't think, they predict patterns in language mathematically, making them functionally incapable of human capacities like compassion and intelligence, both of which require a conscious mind to be displayed. To use words that go against that without being precise is to imply the opposite. It's simply a matter of describing it accurately.
If anything, considering it 'AI' is a semantic argument because it implies there's some form of higher thinking occurring under the surface, which there clearly isn't. It would be like if I said my PC was intelligent because it has a CPU. Obviously we've passed the point of using a better term, but it's still unfortunate we've decided on that because it's inherently misleading.
I think you're using cumbersome in an unnecessarily negative way since it's very much an inevitable feature of the concept at hand. Yes, it's cumbersome, like all controversial fields of study. Things like that work themselves out over time. Until then we'll just have to deal with it without misleading anyone.
What exactly is the harm in people being mislead in this way, as long as they still know about the risks of hallucination, in your eyes?
Because you cant prove that isnt how you do it either.
Disagree, plenty of people still need to hear it.
Those people won't be convinced by this either.
Maybe, but leaving that part out is malpractice.
It's not semantic – it's completely different things happening if there's real consciousness and compassion present based on lifeforms on one hand or a mere simulation of that in form of a text output on the other hand that only superficially looks like there's something intelligent.
People regularly fall for the illusion and project their own feelings into the machine while reading the text output of an LLM. Many are not capable of differentiating and the chatbots are designed in a way to make it more and more difficult to recognize synthetic output.
Humans are good in projecting their own feelings into things they see, just look at all the cat or dog owners who believe they can read the thoughts of their "babies" from their facial expressions.
It's semantic because it's really about language. Who cares that it's not doing that like a human would, everyone who knows anything knows that and they were clearly using language in a less cumbersome way.
yes, everyone already knows what you're saying, but it doesn't matter and serves no purpose other than making it difficult to talk about their behaviours. The only workaround for this would be inventing new terms for when an ai does a behavior that resembles a human one. It'd be very cumbersome and add no value to any conversation.
to those not capable of understanding this or who disagree with you, what you're saying wouldn't convince them anyway, you're just adding noise to these conversations.