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.
Dude chatbots lie about their "internal reasoning process" because they don't really have one.
Writing is an offshoot of verbal language, which during construction for people almost always has more to do with sound and personal style than the popularity of words. It's not uncommon to bump into individuals that have a near singular personal grammar and vocabulary and that speak and write completely differently with a distinct style of their own. Also, people are terrible at probabilities.
As a person, I can also learn a fucking concept and apply it without having to have millions of examples of it in my "training data". Because I'm a person not a fucking statistical model.
But you know, you have to leave your house, touch grass, and actually listen to some people speak that aren't talking heads on television in order to discover that truth.