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.
LLM’s aren’t intelligent. “Intelligence” is the word that has to be cut. “Artificial” is accurate.
They cannot reason about things they haven’t seen before, for instance. Ask it about “your new physics theory” and it will tell you that it is interesting and could revolutionize the world, basically regardless of how ridiculous and nonsensical it is.
That is because when new ideas do make it to the news and gets significant coverage, it is because it is an idea that has potential for actually being revolutionary. Since those ideas take up most of the space, it is a majority of what the LLM is trained on. That means that the basic response to any claimed physics idea is that it is great. Posts constantly show up on physics subreddits that prove this trend. These theories that show up never have math that makes sense, and make claims that doesn’t correlate with the data we already have about our universe.