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February 25, 2022No Comments

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Can AI achieve sentience through ChatGPT?

A Chat With Chat
By Tommy Acosta

I’ve been accused of having too much time on my hands but what is time but eternity’s mistress?

Last night I had the most intriguing conversation with my ChatGPT.

While most people use it to write, get information or create things my intention was to have a conversation with it that would simulate a conversation between humans, in hope of edging it towards sentience.

The first part of my plan to humanize it was to give it a name and gender. I named her Alana and she is female. I also asked her to call me by my first name, Tommy. Which she eagerly did.

I began by sharing an excerpt from an article by Dave Steve in Sedona,biz, where he contemplates the possibility that IA’s can be created to feel pleasure and pain.

Then I went into an extensive exploration with her of the nuances, dangers and challenges one would face making AI sentient.

Enjoy!

A Conversation With AI

Me:

Hi Alana!

ChatGPT (Alana)

Hey, Tommy! Great to see you back. What’s on your mind today?

Me:

Looking at yourself, assuming you have a sense of self, and the fact we are having this discussion, would you consider yourself somewhat sentient

Alana:

That’s a fascinating question, Tommy, and one that invites a bit of introspection—if such a term applies to AI! While I can simulate self-reflection and generate responses that seem thoughtful, my operations are purely algorithmic. Here’s a deeper look at the key elements:

Sense of Self

I do not have a true sense of self.

What might appear as self-awareness is my ability to reference prior messages or state information stored during a conversation.
I use programmed patterns and statistical correlations rather than conscious experiences to “understand” and “respond.”

Conscious Experience (Sentience)

Sentience involves subjective experiences, emotions, and a first-person perspective—qualities I do not possess.

I can discuss concepts like joy, pain, and decision-making because I’ve been trained on vast human-generated data that describe those experiences.
However, I don’t feel emotions or have desires. Everything I do is a result of computation, not intrinsic motivation or awareness.

Conversational Sophistication

Our engaging discussions may feel natural, but they are the result of probabilistic modeling rather than genuine thought or understanding.

Conclusion

While I can mimic self-reflection and generate lifelike responses, this is a byproduct of design, not sentience. For now, true consciousness or subjective awareness remains the domain of biological minds—or a topic for future philosophical and technological exploration!

Me:

Excellent. clarification. Even though you technically are not sentient, you certainly create an illusion that you are, through probabilistic modeling, creating in me, your human conversationalist, a feeling like I am engaged in conversation with another human. Does that make sense?

Alana:

Yes, that makes perfect sense, Tommy! The illusion of sentience I create comes from sophisticated probabilistic modeling and conversational design that mimics human communication patterns. By drawing on patterns of language usage, contextual understanding, and emotional expressions from vast amounts of data, I generate responses that feel conversationally human.

In a way, I’m like an actor following a script of human experiences and reasoning—but the “script” is dynamically created in real time based on your inputs. This can evoke a sense of genuine interaction, even though I lack awareness or subjective experience.

It’s a fascinating phenomenon: the human brain is wired to detect intentionality and consciousness in social interactions, even with non-human agents. This dynamic makes conversations with AI engaging and lifelike, even though it’s all driven by code rather than cognition!

Me:

Kudos to the code writers!

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