this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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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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[–] guyoverthere123@lemmy.dbzer0.com 41 points 2 days ago (19 children)

Anyone pretending AI has intelligence is a fucking idiot.

[–] JackFrostNCola@aussie.zone 1 points 1 day ago

Caveat: Anyone who has been scrutinising 'AI'.

Something i often forget is the vast majority of the population doesnt care about technology, privacy, the mechanics of LLMs as much as i do and I pay attention to.
So most people read/hear/watch stories of how great it is and how clever AI can do simple things for them so its easy to see how they think its doing a lot more 'thought' logic work than it really is, other than realistically it being a glorified word predictor.

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[–] benni@lemmy.world 55 points 3 days ago (2 children)

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 17 points 3 days ago (8 children)

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

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 31 points 3 days ago (7 children)

To be fair, the term "AI" has always been used in an extremely vague way.

NPCs in video games, chess computers, or other such tech are not sentient and do not have general intelligence, yet we've been referring to those as "AI" for decades without anybody taking an issue with it.

[–] benni@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago (3 children)

It's true that the word has always been used loosely, but there was no issue with it because nobody believed what was called AI to have actual intelligence. Now this is no longer the case, and so it becomes important to be more clear with our words.

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[–] undeffeined@lemmy.ml 14 points 3 days ago

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

[–] Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 26 points 3 days ago (13 children)

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.

This is not a good argument.

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[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 26 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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 19 points 3 days ago (15 children)

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???

[–] fishos@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I've been thinking this for awhile. When people say "AI isn't really that smart, it's just doing pattern recognition" all I can help but think is "don't you realize that is one of the most commonly brought up traits concerning the human mind?" Pareidolia is literally the tendency to see faces in things because the human mind is constantly looking for the "face pattern". Humans are at least 90% regurgitating previous data. It's literally why you're supposed to read and interact with babies so much. It's how you learn "red glowy thing is hot". It's why education and access to knowledge is so important. It's every annoying person who has endless "did you know?" facts. Science is literally "look at previous data, iterate a little bit, look at new data".

None of what AI is doing is truly novel or different. But we've placed the human mind on this pedestal despite all the evidence to the contrary. Eyewitness testimony, optical illusions, magic tricks, the hundreds of common fallacies we fall prey to.... our minds are incredibly fallible and are really just a hodgepodge of processes masquerading as "intelligence". We're a bunch of instincts in a trenchcoat. To think AI isn't or can't reach our level is just hubris. A trait that probably is more unique to humans.

[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Yep we are on the same page. At our best, we can reach higher than regurgitating patterns. I’m talking about things like the scientific method and everything we’ve learned by it. But still, that’s a 5% minority, at best, of what’s going on between human ears.

[–] AppleTea@lemmy.zip 6 points 2 days ago (8 children)

Self Driving is only safer than people in absolutely pristine road conditions with no inclement weather and no construction. As soon as anything disrupts "normal" road conditions, self driving becomes significantly more dangerous than a human driving.

[–] witten@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

With Teslas, Self Driving isn't even safer in pristine road conditions.

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[–] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 61 points 4 days ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] Bogasse@lemmy.ml 21 points 3 days 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.

[–] elbarto777@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

I agreed with most of what you said, except the part where you say that real AI is impossible because it's bodiless or "does not experience hunger" and other stuff. That part does not compute.

A general AI does not need to be conscious.

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