alt Hacker NewsShould we put "functional" in front of every other word to talk about AI? They have functional emotions, but they don't feel. They have functional goals, but not internally derived motives. They can be functionally rogue, but have no innate need to be free. Talking about AI that way seems cumbersome and not necessarily elucidating.
Replies
I would rather use something like “semblance” or “appearance”. All these terms require an inner experience which we cannot observe in LLMs, we can just see their semblance, like a shadow of the traces of an inner experience some human has left in the data that trained these algorithms.
Yes 100%. The language used currently maximizes the ability of those building these models to get off the hook. The anthropomorphizing we do of these things presents them as maximally capable and the companies as helpless to contain them. The way we talk about things impacts how we think about them.
They do not have emotions, goals, or motivations, "functional" or otherwise. They are statistical models that appear as a magic trick to people who aren't familiar with the math.
What on earth are emotions, feelings and motives that are not functional? We created all those words to compactly describe the observed behavior of people and other animals, including ourselves. And now we’re applying them to machines. These are functional descriptions, always have been.