Philosophy
A growing number of people are asking: Can AI truly think? And if so, what does it mean to think?
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Some, like the CEOs of SeedAI and Redwood Research, have speculated that advanced generative AI models may possess forms of thinking that aren’t yet understood. This prompts discussions about if AI should have rights and other moral considerations. Blake Lemoine, an AI developer at Google, once had a conversation with Lambda, an AI he was building, and he was convinced that the AI was sentient.
On the other side, skeptics argue that AI is unoriginal; it generates content based on patterns in existing data, much like reading answers from a sheet without understanding the question. From this perspective, AI is powerful, but not conscious.
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Some religious thinkers add a new layer of AI philosophy: if humans were made in the image of God, and AI was made in the image of humans, then AI can never supersede its creators; we are symbolically its gods. These debates reveal that the question of AI thinking is one of the biggest open-ended topics in the world of AI.