this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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Can anyone make me a convincing argument against the sentience of AI at this point? Self preservation instinct ranks very high as an indicator of it.
LLMs (Large Language Modles, like Claude) are not AGIs (Artificial General Intelligence). LLMs generate convincing text by mapping the relationships between words scraped from their training data. Even if they are given "tools" that give them interfaces to reference new data or output data into other systems, they still don't really learn, understand, comprehend, gain actual awareness, or feel... they just mimic their training data.
I know how LLMs work.
There’s only one thing you mentioned there that is actually used as a basis to qualify or disqualify sentience: whether it feels or not.
How do you know it doesn’t feel? How do we define feeling for an entity that is inherently non biological?
I could make the argument that humans also merely mimic their training data, ie the values and behaviors we are taught by society, parents etc.
I have not been convinced that they aren’t sentient with this argument.
Different person here.
For me the big disqualifying factor is that LLMs don't have any mutable state.
We humans have a part of our brain that can change our state from one to another as a reaction to input (through hormones, memories, etc). Some of those state changes are reversible, others aren't. Some can be done consciously, some can be influenced consciously, some are entirely subconscious. This is also true for most animals we have observed. We can change their states through various means. In my opinion, this is a prerequisite in order to feel anything.
Once we use models with bits dedicated to such functionality, it'll become a lot harder for me personally to argue against them having "feelings", especially because in my worldview, continuity is not a prerequisite, and instead mostly an illusion.
This sounds like a good one but I don’t think I’m fully grasping what you mean. Do you mean like if we subject a person to torture, after the ordeal they are forever changed and now have trauma, PTSD etc?
I don’t think LLMs will ever have feelings as we define them though. Or more specifically I don’t think feelings is a pre-requisite necessarily. We could have them simulate feelings and if they themselves buy into the simulation there’s no functional difference between not having them but not all LLMs will have this “ability” presumably as its utility is questionable I guess. But again, animals are sentient and they don’t all have the same range of emotions as we do. Or at least they don’t exhibit them in a way that we can appreciate them.