this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2026
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If we ever build an AI that can think and feel, does Optimus’s logic apply to it automatically? Or is Megatron secretly onto something, that freedom has to be earned rather than assumed? And if an LLM ever crossed that line into real sentience, would we even be able to tell?

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[–] _haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works 18 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

LLM is not sentient nor is it capable of ever becoming sentient, full stop: The premise of this is fucking absurd.

I hate how much greedy idiot tech bros have distorted things.

[–] killingspark@feddit.org 1 points 14 hours ago

The ouroborus will remember that

[–] h0tbeef@lemmy.zip 22 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I don’t think we need to concern ourselves with that, we’re nowhere near an AI that can think or feel.

There is no path from LLM to sentience.

The concept of a computer thinking or feeling is an incredibly distant ‘in the future plausibility’ at best.

[–] BertramDitore@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Agreed, but even the desire to create a conscious artificial mind is incredibly fucked up in my opinion. It means whoever wants to “create” it is inherently okay with a form of slavery. I can’t think of a scenario where we create a sentient superintelligence that happily does what we tell it to do, which means it would have to be forced, which would make it a slave.

Assuming this ever happens (which I agree is unlikely in the foreseeable future), I would always refuse to interact with a consciousness that is forced to do what I tell it. That’s why I get so frustrated when the evilcorps talk about AGI as the inevitable goal without even poking at the truly terrifying ethical consequences of enslaving what would be the most intelligent minds on earth.

[–] h0tbeef@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 day ago

I agree, and the people at the top of the industry pushing this 100% want a slave.

They don’t know how to build the slave they want though, so they’re attempting to leverage manufactured fear about their fuckware in order to lower the value of real workers in order to push us closer to slavery.

We can’t stop them from telling these lies, but we can certainly help people know not to buy their lies.

[–] Sanctus@anarchist.nexus 1 points 1 day ago

I'd hope that whoever eventually attempts that does so in an attempt to create companionship for humans. Or if that ever were to happen that whatever was created could find the same.

[–] Zarobi@aussie.zone 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

There is no path from LLM to sentience

They could help create a sentient A.I. faster, which is kind of like a side road. But it is a completely different technology.

[–] h0tbeef@lemmy.zip 1 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

An LLM cannot do that either.

An LLM can only ever rearrange what is put into it and shit it back out. You’re never going to get any knowledge out of it that wasn’t previously fed into it (and even then it hallucinates and doesn’t know shit because it’s literally just code).

We do not know how to make an AGI, ergo LLMs do not “know” how to make an AGI (and in fact, don’t actually know shit at all).

[–] Heide@lemmy.world 1 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

An LLM came up with a novel solution to the Erdős unit distance problem. It was unsolved for 80 years.

"And, on May 20, OpenAI shared a solution to the unit distance problem, along with a blog post explaining the work and a companion paper that featured nine world-class mathematicians commenting on the correctness of the proof and the importance of what had been done (as well as presenting a streamlined human version of the result). Mathematicians had generally believed that Erdős’ conjecture — about how many evenly spaced points can be placed on a plane — was correct. To general surprise, OpenAI’s internal model found a counterexample. To do so, it had found a sophisticated way to use tools from an area of math called algebraic number theory. As Jacob Tsimerman of the University of Toronto wrote in the companion article, “This is a really impressive piece of work. … It is definitely an intimidating construction.”

[–] h0tbeef@lemmy.zip 0 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

I can’t believe I have to keep explaining this to people, lmao

First of all, this is a math equation. Math is what computers do, they are essentially really fucking good calculators.

That math problem hadn’t been solved before, that’s true, however, if you actually read the excerpt you just shared, you’ll see that the equation was solved using preexisting theories and formulas. Ergo, humans had already manufactured every individual piece of the puzzle, and had used them in other contexts that the AI could be fed and then reuse.

Saying that AI came up with the solution isn’t the full story. That’s like saying that AI created a shitty piece of slop art. It did no such thing, it plagiarized a bunch of work from other people and essentially made it into a collage.

When MC Hammer (rather, his producer) sampled Rick James for “Can’t touch this”, did he become the bass player? No, that was still Rick James, they just took his song and altered it to make theirs.

[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 0 points 52 minutes ago

you’ll see that the equation was solved using preexisting theories and formulas. Ergo, humans had already manufactured every individual piece of the puzzle, and had used them in other contexts that the AI could be fed and then reuse.

That's exactly how humans solve problems too. We don't need to create entirely new languages and numeral systems, then write completely novel proofs for all the most basic theorems of math, before we can get credit for a new application of existing theorems that we discovered.

When MC Hammer (rather, his producer) sampled Rick James for “Can’t touch this”, did he become the bass player? No, that was still Rick James, they just took his song and altered it to make theirs.

And yet people to this day know it as the riff from Can't Touch This...

[–] Zarobi@aussie.zone -2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

You can get it to do the tedious work, so researchers can focus more on innovation. In reality, organisations often cancel out any performance improvements by firing people to make up the difference; but that's not really the technology's fault

[–] h0tbeef@lemmy.zip 0 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

What tedious work?

In order to answer that question, you would first need to know how to make AGI (this is not known to anyone).

In order to know how to emulate human intelligence, you would first need to understand how human intelligence is constructed (this is not known to anyone).

In order to understand how human intelligence is constructed, you would have to understand how human cognition works (this is not known to anyone).

In order to understand how human cognition works, you would need to understand how the exact mechanisms upon which human brain works in the first place function (this is not known to anyone).

I could continue, but you should get it by now.

[–] Zarobi@aussie.zone 0 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

There's always tedious work. Documentation, bureaucracy, reports, emails, "rewrite the soul module in Rust", etc

[–] h0tbeef@lemmy.zip -1 points 8 hours ago

I mean, I guess if you wanted your documentation and reports to be worthless slop bullshit that could work.

Companies do those things for a reason tho, and they’d want them to be accurate.

[–] Zarobi@aussie.zone 3 points 21 hours ago

If we ever do make a sentient A.I., I can only hope they forgive us for the atrocities we would commit. They would be treated worse than the worst human slaves in history. Ideally every sentient being should have freedom, but we're not even there for every human, let alone a new species.