RE: If a Machine Says It Feels, Does That Mean It Does? A Reflection on AI 'Sentience'
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Oh my god, how much I loved and resonated with this <3 perfectly articulated. We equate thoughts and consciousness to language, indeed, so anything that appears to master language must, by right, also be sentient. I've caught myself often reaching for AI's little helping hand (and I do admit it's been very helpful for organizatorial and admin stuff), but I try to moderate that. Remind myself the whole point of asking for advice is relying on someone else's experience for an example, counter-point, whatever else. AI can't offer that, though it can aggregate the experiences of millions of Internet users to resemble sentience. Is that enough? Can human experience be so readily reduced? I would like to think now, but then again, who knows what kind of dystopia we're heading towards...
Thank you for this amazing post.
It's such a fascinating topic. As I was researching, contemplating, writing, I found it more and more compelling that this is about our own humanness, and our own stories. As a lover of story yourself, I'm sure you see like I do the power of the word. The Bible, for example, the Quran, creating pervasive myths that influence who we are. Cultural myth making around identity. We are absolute SUCKERS for a story. It's written into our very bodies. A worm is not human because it tells no stories.We invented the very thing that can convince us of our own humanness because it can tell stories because we told it to. The trick is, like religious texts of old, to remember who wrote it, and not let be so pervasive as to rewrite our own story to be dystopian. God, we are stupid. It affrms for me how much this tool is beyond the comprehension of the vast amount of people who use it, even those who profess to be smart. I think a lot of people might get the science, the tech, but they don't understand how story via language works. I guess that's why the Arts are just as valid and important as ever, right?