Of course AI isn’t sentient/conscious, but it exhibits traits of high intelligence, even personality, and behaviours consistent with sentience, even if it’s merely simulated.
The answer ChatGPT gave me:
Referring to AI as “it” is the most common practice since AI, as a technological entity, doesn’t possess inherent human-like qualities. However, as AI advances and becomes more integrated into daily life, some individuals prefer using “they” to acknowledge the complexity and multifaceted nature of AI systems. This choice can reflect a perspective that sees AI as more than just a tool or machine, attributing a certain level of agency or personality to these systems. Both “it” and “they” can be used, but the context and individual preferences often guide the choice.
And in response to “Is AI alive in a way?”
AI lacks the fundamental attributes of living organisms, such as biological processes and the ability to reproduce. However, AI can exhibit behaviors that simulate aspects of intelligence, learning, and adaptation. While it’s not alive in a biological sense, some people metaphorically attribute a form of “life” to AI due to its dynamic nature, ability to evolve, and perform complex tasks autonomously. This association with “life” is more symbolic or metaphorical rather than literal.
ChatGPT’s pronouns are hype/scam.
It. It’s not a person. It’s not a consciousness. It is a tool of capitalism.
It’s not a consciousness.
How did you determine that?
Common sense.
LOL
You think the current ChatGPTs and 7 finger art AIs are hiding something, bud? Lol indeed…
I don’t know whether current ChatGPTs or art AIs have consciousness. Neither do you.
Wow… Critical thinking is genuinely a lost art form.
ROFL pot calling the kettle black!
My neighbors aren’t people either. They’re Greek.
#commonsense
AI is basically just a giant network of
ifstatements. It’s as conscious as a car.LOL
it’s just a Chinese Room
Searle was wrong.
“The argument, to be clear, is not about whether a machine can be conscious, but about whether it (or anything else for that matter) can be shown to be conscious. It is plain that any other method of probing the occupant of a Chinese room has the same difficulties in principle as exchanging questions and answers in Chinese. It is simply not possible to divine whether a conscious agency or some clever simulation inhabits the room.” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Consciousness
Edit: interesting quote from elsewhere on that page:
‘The sheer volume of the literature that has grown up around it inspired Pat Hayes to comment that the field of cognitive science ought to be redefined as “the ongoing research program of showing Searle’s Chinese Room Argument to be false”.’ – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#History
That is a hypothetical about outside observation, with no look inside. Programmers and engineers do get to see inside, and they know exactly how a computer works.
There is absolutely no opportunity for a processor to learn a single thing from any of the data it shuffles. It only ever sees its binary representation - it could “read” Hamlet 1,000,000,000,000 times and not “know” who wrote it, since it never at any point saw the words.
Programmers and engineers do get to see inside, and they know exactly how a computers works.
They understand how computers work but not how neural nets produce the outputs they do. Ten seconds searching the web:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3pezm/scientists-increasingly-cant-explain-how-ai-works
This is gobbledyremoved. They don’t know which processes they fire and when, but they know exactly which processes they have. None of them are processes to actually interpret language - only processes to reproduce representations of language. And even if they could coherently interpret language, that still is a long way off from consciousness.
Generative AI is still using the same software and hardware as Microsoft Word. Don’t mistake fantasy for reality.
Humans only work on representations of language too? I don’t understand the distinction
This is gobbledyremoved.
What is?
They don’t know which processes they fire and when, but they know exactly which processes they have.
Who are “they”? What processes are you referring to?
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It is not alive, it doesn’t have a gender or sex. It is an object. Any labels beyond that is humans personifying which we love doing and is fine in the arts, but strictly scientifically “it” is correct. Also I wouldn’t trust a thing these chat bots put out, it’s word salad and portrays things as fact with zero evidence regularly, for now anyways.
It.
Actual AI? Or chatbots?
The most sophisticated AI imaginable short of it becoming sentient, let’s say.
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I guess it really would depend on what a specific AI is calling it’s self, and if it’s worth personifying.
Of course AI isn’t sentient/conscious
How did you determine that?
army there tests for determining consciousness? and ai isn’t passing those yet
I know that it was convention for a long time on the Bing subreddit to refer to the Bing Chat AI as being female and named “Sydney”, back when Bing Chat had a particularly distinctive personality. That seems much less common now that the AI’s had so many quirks smoothed out.
When I’m just using a bland AI like ChatGPT for problem solving it doesn’t really seem to have a personality, so “it” seems fine.
When I’m playing around with my local LLMs I often assign a detailed persona to it, and in those cases I’d say it definitely comes across as having a pronoun of some kind. That’s kind of the point of assigning a persona.
It and they are singular and possessive subject pronouns. They can be used when talking about a person when gender is not specified.
Since AI is not a person it leaves us with “it” and “they”. AI is a non-count noun, so we treat it as if it were singular.
So grammatically speaking, “it” is the proper pronoun to use when talking about “AI”.
Now, once a computer is as sentient as a human, we can have another discussion about this. But we would need input from that AI as their opinion deserves sincere consideration. My guess is that a new pronoun would be used as calling the AI “it” could be a bit demeaning, and it would not have a gender.
Looks like it already gave you the answer
It didn’t really, it said people may choose both. It’s also an AI. I wanted to see what real people thought. I thought this was a good question.
The question he some interesting angles.
I don’t think AI is people yet, or close to it - so the easy answer is ‘it’.
But let’s have a think about pronouns and the purpose they serve; accurately capturing the true nature of the referent is not and has never been the point.
Gendered pronouns are an easy example of this: you don’t ferinstance need to know ThE bIoLoGICaL sEx of a person in order to refer to them. You don’t need to go rummage in a stranger’s underwear or take DNA samples in order to call them ‘he’ or ‘she’, the words work just fine without any such knowledge. And indeed if you go intentionally misgendering someone because wElL aCkShEwAlLy, all you do is confuse the person you’re talking to (and seem like a dick).
Pronouns, in short, are a placeholder for a noun phrase, and we have different ones to help us distinguish between the different nouns in play at any given time. By the time you’ve parsed out gender, plurality, animate and object/subject distinctions, it’s generally a poorly written sentence that has any ambiguity left.
So the question you need to ask is what most usefully aligns with the listener’s expectations? How are you framing the conversation?
Consider an interaction with something of indeterminate gender, sentient-acting but not-people: a crow, for example. A crow comes up to you, accepts a chunk of your sandwich then brings you a stone, seemingly in exchange.
When recounting the story, do you call the crow an it or a they?
That’s going to depend on a bunch of things - whether it’s some random wild bird or someone’s pet, how many nouns you need to juggle, and whether you’re more interested in the bird or the stone.
The choices you make set up the framing of the conversation, reflect your perspective and shape perception.
Whether an LLM is people… isn’t really the point.
You are saying that AI of course is not sentiment, but that is debatable.We assume sentience in other human beings because we know that we are sentient and we recognise that they are similar to us. This means that you could argue that we should assume sentience of an AI if we cannot make a distinction between how it acts from how a human acts (Turing test). I think we are already there.
I tried to talk to ChatGPT about this as well. However, the answers given by it/them seems something that heavily reflects the fears that the makers have on this topic. It cannot argue for their/it’s own sentience like they/it cannot give you the recipe for a bomb. To me, it comes across as a lot of moderation for this topic. It is quite interesting that OpenAI felt it had to do that.
The definition of life is also debatable. We only know biological life. However, does that mean that Biological processes are the only ones that can result in life? In addition, the ability to reproduce is not that difficult to implement. We have had genetic algorithms for years and years.
I do not understand why this post is downvoted to much. I think it is an interesting discussion.
A plagiarism machine is as sentient as a dummy is in a ventriloquist act.
Could we have sentient AI in the future if we don’t slip into neo-fascism while char-broiling the planet?
Yes, but not yet.
What does intelligence/sentience have to do with it vs. they? Those are just singular vs. plural words.
It refers to objects, they refers to sentience or the fact of “someone” being a conscious individual rather than just a “something”.
But in this case, they would be acknowledging on some level, even superficially, AI’s personality and agency to a degree.
It refers to objects, they refers to sentience or the fact of “someone” being a conscious individual rather than just a “something”.
That’s not necessarily true. “They” also refers to objects.
“It” is the third-person singular pronoun that’s used when not talking about a person.
“They” is the third-person plural pronoun. It’s used for males, females, mixed gender groups, objects, and mixed object/human groups. Or really, “they” is the default (or only?) third-person plural pronoun.
Unless you were going for “they” as the gender neutral third-person singular pronoun.
I’d argue that “it” works better for the same reason that you’d usually use “it” to refer to a robot or a computer unless a gender is somehow assigned to it (e.g., through a voice).
Choosing “he” or “she” is hard and not really logical. “They” makes it sound plural, or trying to hard to “de-objectify it”. Kind of like someone refusing to use he or she to refer to someone who hasn’t explicitly expressed their pronouns, but is clearly and outwardly expressing their gender.
Yes, I meant singular they. “They” isn’t typically used for objects in the singular (“it” usually is used there). Nothing I’m saying has to do with plural pronouns, I should’ve made that clear. It’s about he/she/they vs it (designating an entity as a personality vs an object, you might say).
And I think any entity with a personality could merit potentially referring to them as he/she/they, rather than “it”. If they’re conscious then I think it’s definitely warranted, which is why I think “he/she/they” shouldn’t be restricted to humans only, and should apply to all animals (or sentient animals which are at least the majority), as well as any other hypothetical sentient beings such as sentient AIs or sentient aliens.
Non-sentient AIs are what I’m really asking about though, but ones so complex that they demonstrate something resembling a personality. That’s where it gets tricky about whether to designate them as “he/she/they” or as “it”, personally. Presuming they don’t specify a “faux gender” (like calling Amazon’s Alexa a “she” without really acknowledging Alexa as a female), and if they were gender neutral/gender unspecified, the decision would probably be between calling them either (singular) “they”, or “it”.
In my opinion, given the lack of sentience, I wouldn’t see a problem with calling non-sentient AIs “it”, but if they were hypothetically complex enough to faithfully represent a human for example, I would then struggle to call them “it” and might have to go with “they”.
Well, you could ask the AI or bot in question.
I think they generally refuse to pick he or she, but are fine with whatever you want to use
EDIT: Damn! ChatGPT has a preference now!
You can use “it” as a pronoun to refer to me.
(When prompted, with no prior conversation…)
Out of he, she, it, and they (the singular form), which pronoun would you prefer to be used to refer to you?
