this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
967 points (94.9% liked)

Technology

72739 readers
1437 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. 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.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 61 points 2 weeks 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.

[–] audaxdreik@pawb.social 27 points 2 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

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] benni@lemmy.world 55 points 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 2 weeks ago (10 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.

load more comments (10 replies)
load more comments (7 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] guyoverthere123@lemmy.dbzer0.com 42 points 2 weeks ago (19 children)

Anyone pretending AI has intelligence is a fucking idiot.

load more comments (19 replies)
[–] Geodad@lemmy.world 34 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

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 20 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

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.

load more comments (7 replies)
load more comments (7 replies)
[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 26 points 2 weeks 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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 26 points 2 weeks 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.

load more comments (13 replies)
[–] RalphWolf@lemmy.world 24 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)

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

load more comments (9 replies)
[–] bbb@sh.itjust.works 24 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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 19 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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 20 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (12 children)

"…" (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.

load more comments (12 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Bogasse@lemmy.ml 21 points 2 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 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

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.”

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 19 points 2 weeks ago (28 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???

load more comments (28 replies)
[–] aceshigh@lemmy.world 17 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (6 children)

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.

[–] Snapz@lemmy.world 30 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] PushButton@lemmy.world 27 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

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

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›