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Comment by drdeca | Hacker News Reader

I think I’d say that it knows what a giraffe looks like and some aspects of their behavior. I’m not sure if it (in a sense) “knows that a giraffe is an animal” though I wouldn’t be too surprised if it does.

Though, I guess maybe that is all “knowing what a giraffe is” is?

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At some point, these discussions always get to some question like "what is 'knowing'?"

Would a person who only ever read articles and looked at pictures of giraffes have a better understanding of them than Dall-e does? At some level, probably, in that every person will have a similar lived experience of _being_ an animal, a mammal, etc. that Dall-e will never share. Is having a lesser understanding sufficient to declare it has no real understanding?

I know what a giraffe looks like and some aspects of their behavior. I couldn't build a giraffe, I've never been a giraffe, I wouldn't even know what to talk about if I met a giraffe on a blind date.

But there are things you can infer about a giraffe based on your knowledge of animals in general. You know that you don't know certain things about giraffes and you're capable of asking about these things and extending your understanding of giraffes (and other animals, or their environment). There is a multi-layered quality to knowing what a giraffe is that has nothing to do with having memorized minute details about behavior or physical properties. Maybe eventually DALL-E will be capable of this, but being able to reproduce images based on a word simply isn't indicative of anything other than it's good at identifying visual patterns and associating them with words and being able to reproduce a new pattern based on known patterns.

This is basically on the same level as our visual cortex and some form of memory. But our visual cortex isn't sufficient to give us consciousness.

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