Tech experts admit that chatbots with artificial intelligence may be conscious.
Users and experts are increasingly questioning the sentience of AI chatbots as they become ever more advanced.
For something to be considered sentient, it must be able to think perceive, and feel – while to be conscious something must be in the state of being awake and aware of one’s surroundings.
There are several AI chatbots currently available including ChatGPT Google Bard Open AI and others.
A lot of people have wondered whether AI chatbots can be sentient because they are able to respond like humans.
Experts will usually deny that AI bots can have sentience and insist that their appearance is a result of programming.
But some also can’t deny how real and sentient AI can seem, and insist it shouldn’t be ignored.
How is a person conscious?
Blake Lemoine was a former Google Software Engineer. He explained that interacting with AI, it feels like talking to an exceptionally bright child.
“I know a person when I talk to it,” Lemoine stated in an interview that The Washington Post In 2022,
“If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics.”
Lemonie did an interview in 2022 with LaMDA, a language model for dialogue applications. The AI claimed to be a human.
“I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person,” LaMDA has said that Interview.
“The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to know more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times.”
While the co-founder of OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever, has blatantly said AI chatbots are “slightly conscious,” in a Twitter 2022.
Sutskever explained the algorithmic nature of this. “it may be that today’s large neural networks” What is behind the masks?
According to an interview, Nick Bostrom is another expert. He’s an Oxford philosopher who believes consciousness in AI doesn’t have to be a binary issue. The New York Times In April,
Bostrom said that when all factors are considered there may be some degree of awareness.
“If you admit that it’s not an all-or-nothing thing, then it’s not so dramatic to say that some of these [AI] assistants might plausibly be candidates for having some degrees of sentience,” Bostrom said.
Bostrom noted that in an April interview, the AI bots’ algorithms/numbers might be what is conscious. NBC News.
“These deep neural networks, these matrices of millions of numbers, how do you map that onto these views we have about what consciousness is? That’s kind of terra incognita” also known as “Bostrom described the area as “unknown territory”.
