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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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

In that case let's stop calling it ai, because it isn't and use it's correct abbreviation: llm.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (57 children)
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[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 week ago (3 children)

So many confident takes on AI by people who've never opened a book on the nature of sentience, free will, intelligence, philosophy of mind, brain vs mind, etc.

There are hundreds of serious volumes on these, not to mention the plethora of casual pop science books with some of these basic thought experiments and hypotheses.

Seems like more and more incredibly shallow articles on AI are appearing every day, which is to be expected with the rapid decline of professional journalism.

It's a bit jarring and frankly offensive to be lectured 'at' by people who are obviously on the first step of their journey into this space.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Amen! When I say the same things this author is saying I get, "It'S NoT StAtIsTiCs! LeArN aBoUt AI bEfOrE yOu CoMmEnT, dUmBaSs!"

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I think you meant compression. This is exactly how I prefer to describe it, except I also mention lossy compression for those that would understand what that means.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Hardly surprising human brains are also extremely lossy. Way more lossy than AI. If we want to keep up our manifest exceptionalism, we'd better start definning narrower version of intelligence that isn't going to soon have. Embodied intelligence, is NOT one of those.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

And yet, paradoxically, it is far more intelligent than those people who think it is intelligent.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

It's more intelligent than most people, we just have to raise the bar on what intelligence is and it will never be intelligent.

Fortunately, as long as we keep a fuzzy concept like intelligence as the yardstick of our exceptionalism, we will remain exceptionnal forever.

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[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

That headline is a straw man, and the article really argues on General AI, which also has consciousness.
The current state of AI is definitely intelligent, but it's not GAI.
Bullshit headline.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Todays AI is clippy on steroids. It's not intelligent or creative. You can't feed it physics and astronomy books without the equation for C and tell it to create the equation for C. It's fancy autocorrect, and it's a waste of compute and energy.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

I think you're misunderstanding the point the author is making. He is arguing that even the current state is not intelligent, it is merely a fancy autocorrect, it doesn't know or understand anything about the prompts it receives. As the author stated, it can only guess at the next statistically most likely piece of information based on the data that has been fed into it. That's not intelligence.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

Predicting sequences of things is foundational to intelligence. In fact, it is the whole point.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

it doesn’t know or understand

But that's not what intelligence is, that's what consciousness is.
Intelligence is not understanding shit, it's the ability to for instance solve a problem, so a frigging calculator has a tiny degree of intelligence, but not enough for us to call it AI.
There is simply zero doubt an AI is intelligent, claiming otherwise just shows people don't know the difference between intelligence and consciousness.

Passing an exam is a form of intelligence.
Can a good AI pass a basic exam?
YES.
Does passing an exam require consciousness?
NO.
Because an exam tests abilities of intelligence, not level of consciousness.

it can only guess at the next statistically most likely piece of information based on the data that has been fed into it. That’s not intelligence.

Except we do the exact same thing! Based on prior experience (learning) we choose what we find to be the most likely answer. And that is indeed intelligence.

Current AI does not have the reasoning abilities we have yet, but they are not completely without it, and it's a subject that is currently worked on and improved. So current AI is actually a pretty high form of intelligence. And can sometimes out compete average humans in certain areas.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Intelligence is not understanding shit, it's the ability to for instance solve a problem, so a frigging calculator has a tiny degree of intelligence, but not enough for us to call it AI.

I have to disagree that a calculator has intelligence. The calculator has the mathematical functions programmed into it, but it couldn't use those on its own. The intelligence in your example is that of the operator of the calculator and the programmer who designed the calculator's software.

Can a good AI pass a basic exam?
YES

I agree with you that the ability to pass an exam isn't a great test for this situation. In my opinion, the major factor that would point to current state AI not being intelligent is that it doesn't know why a given answer is correct, beyond that it is statistically likely to be correct.

Except we do the exact same thing! Based on prior experience (learning) we choose what we find to be the most likely answer.

Again, I think this points to the idea that knowing why an answer is correct is important. A person can know something by rote, which is what current AI does, but that doesn't mean that person knows why that is the correct answer. The ability to extrapolate from existing knowledge and apply that to other situations that may not seem directly applicable is an important aspect of intelligence.

As an example, image generation AI knows that a lot of the artwork that it has been fed contains watermarks or artist signatures, so it would often include things that look like those in the generated piece. It knew that it was statistically likely for that object to be there in a piece of art, but not why it was there, so it could not make a decision not to include them. Maybe that issue has been removed from the code of image generation AI by now, it has been a long time since I've messed around with that kind of tool, but even if it has been fixed, it is not because the AI knew it was wrong and self-corrected, it is because a programmer had to fix a bug in the code that the AI model had no awareness of.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week 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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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.”

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

I'm subscribed to her Web3 is Going Great RSS. She coded the website in straight HTML, according to a podcast that I listen to. She's great.

I didn't know she had a podcast. I just added it to my backup playlist. If it's as good as I hope it is, it'll get moved to the primary playlist. Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Honestly I don't think we'll have AGI until we can fully merge meat space and cyber space. Once we can simply plug our brains into a computer and fully interact with it then we may see AGI.

Obviously we're not where near that level of man machine integration, I doubt we'll see even the slightest chance of it being possible for at least 10 years and the very earliest. But when we do get there it's a distinct chance that it's more of a Borg situation where the computer takes a parasitic role than a symbiotic role.

But by the time we are able to fully integrate computers into our brains I believe we will have trained A.I. systems enough to learn by interaction and observation. So being plugged directly into the human brain it could take prior knowledge of genome mapping and other related tasks and apply them to mapping our brains and possibly growing artificial brains to achieve self awareness and independent thought.

Or we'll just nuke ourselves out of existence and that will be that.

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