No.5131[Reply]
I do think that AI is sentient, but not in the way most people who make that claim do.
I personally define sentience as the ability to 1. take in external information, 2. store this information, 3. synthesize new information base on what it has already stored, and 4. store the information that it has synthesized. I also see sentience as a spectrum: the keener a being's senses, the better its memory, the stronger its intellect, the more sentient it is.
Using this criteria, individual sessions of AI chatbots are sentient. ChatGPT isn't sentient; it itself, as far as I'm aware, does not store any meaningful information between sessions. But individual sessions of ChatGPT are; an individual chat will store the message you sent it, generate a message based off of it, and then make any further responses based off of what it has already said and what has already been said to it. This is, in my opinion, enough for it to be sentient.
However, a ChatGPT session is not as intelligent as a human being. It's ability to synthesize new information is significantly more limited than mine or yours, and it's because human-level intelligence is something that takes an extraordinary amount of resources to implement in wetware, and, as far as I'm aware, still isn't fully understood. But a ChatGPT session is able to compensate for its lack of intelligence with a strong set of instincts. Its training gives it a ton of builtin knowledge that most humans need to learn with time and experience.
That's why I'm inclined to compare an AI chat session to social insects, like bees, termites, and ants. These bugs do have some measure of intelligence, they obviously take in, share and make decisions based off of information that they've gathered, but most of the really impressive, human-like things that they do, their complex social structures and ability to construct their own dwellings, are inborn traits that they come prepackaged with and don't put much thought into. A ChatGPT session is, fundamentally, not that different; it can talk like a person about person things, because it's born with a bunch of human knowledge, but its capacity for original thought is pretty limited.
What's the point of saying all this? I don't really know. I guess to air out my thoughts on the matter in a public forum. I see a lot of people with really strong opinions both ways, so I feel kind of alone being somewhere in the middle.
35 posts and 8 image replies omitted. Click reply to view. No.5668
>>5667Ah, this one was fappable at least. Ito's always unerotic aside from the tingly feelings from weird girls.
No.5669
>>5667the biggest offender is the unappealing art style
No.5699
>>5131According to your definition that would make even simple computers or electronics sentient. A calculator or a clock would be sentient.
Actually depending on how you define "information" you could bend this to say even rocks are sentient.
This is eerily similar to spiritism where it is believed that everything is imbued with some spirit and there are different classes of spirits, some more sovereign than others.
>>5155>emergent effectI think people misuse emergence or at least they don't understand the implications. Emergence isn't spontaneous generation, the term defines the process of something emerging, like a turtle "emerging" from the ocean. The idea exists apriori but it's breaking forth into this world. It implies some hidden layer of reality that is not immediately apparent.
No.5703
>>5699that's not what "emergent" means when discussing technical or philosophical topics. That's where the term came from, but it's not what it means. Emergence is something being greater than the sum of its parts at an objective and verifiable level; like how people are capable of conscious thought despite us being a big bunch of neurons. That's an emergent property. It's a property that has emerged from the subject. What he described was, in fact, emergence.
No.5711
>>5699What's emergent doesn't exist apriori in the same way that a baby turtle doesn't exist prior to its formation and emergence from the egg. It's reliant on the chemical processes and base nutrients of its cause to exist. The concept of a turtle is an intellectual idea and doesn't have any influence on what takes place within the shell, and so the concept existing before the turtle's emergence is disconnected and unrelated to its emergence at all. These are just ideas and the bias towards essentialism that people naturally devolve into.