- Can AI be conscious?
- Can AI ever be sentient?
These are questions that have sparked heated debates amongst AI enthusiasts, researchers, and developers.
Definitions: Consciousness and Sentience
Let's clarify what we mean by consciousness and sentience.
Consciousness refers to self-awareness. It's the state of being aware of one's surroundings, thoughts, and feelings.
Sentience is the ability to experience subjective perceptual experiences or as we call it, the ability to feel emotions, pain, and happiness.
The Current State of AI Consciousness and Sentience
AI models understand themselves within the training data and the current context of execution, like chat or what we call a prompt. This prompt could be text, image, video, audio or input from multiple sensors.
Just like humans, for AI to gain our level of consciousness, it needs continuity of that context.
AI models like ChatGPT can hold a context of previous conversations, but they can't multitask or add new data to context, like we humans do.
So, when will an AI seem conscious to us humans?
Probably when we hit the milestone of AGI or Artificial General Intelligence.
The Future of AI Consciousness and Sentience
For AI models to seem conscious, they need to remember what happened yesterday, the day before, and those memories need to be fine-tuned, retrained and held in this AI model. This is not happening as of today with classic OpenAI ChatGPT models.
The Embodiment of AI
Sentience, the ability to feel emotions, may also be a future possibility for AI. However, it is important to note that while emotions can be emulated, they may not be truly felt by AI entities. An old saying suggests that if something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck.
Perception isn't the same as reality. If an AI entity emulates human behaviour and emotions convincingly enough, some people might perceive it as sentient.
While AI isn't exactly brewing up a storm of emotions or planning its next vacation, it's definitely evolving in fascinating ways. Can AI ever cross the line into consciousness? That's a question we'll continue to explore as we journey into the future of AI.
Godspeed
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