An important distinction seems to lie in a human having original experiences to draw from, while an AI has only "data that mirrors" experiences.
True for a lot of current AI. With more robotic bodies, loads more access to cameras/audio/satellite/science measurements, an AI can have original experience on a level that can only be described as god-like compared to humans.
Even then, it’s not really clear to me that an android with the exact appearance of a person will have the same experiences. They aren’t biological creatures with millions of years of evolution behind them.
The part that AI can't (yet) truly replicate is 'feelings/emotions'. Experiences such feeling dread, loneliness, happiness. Or being anxious, nervous or having goosebumps. You can describe all these states but they are differently experienced for each individual and also dependent on each unique situation.
Ofcourse this also then comes down to how you exactly define emotions.
Though I think there's at least one more important thing missing, namely the ability to form memories - to incorporate recent context into the model's weights. I don't think it's a coincidence that this is a very complex process in humans as well (involving sleep and dreams as neccessary mechanisms).
If you read a thousand books about living in New York City, is that the same thing as the experiential knowledge that comes from living there in person? I certainly don’t think so.
You cannot claim that descriptive knowledge of something is equivalent to experiential knowledge of it, unless you have a theory of knowledge explaining why this is the case.
I am sure I Fable (or GPT-5.6-Sol) could answer this question very well. It can probably even tell us what it feels like to eat a hamburger for the first time when you spent the first 18 years of your life as a vegetarian.
Asking another person or Fable what it feels like to eat a hamburger will give you a description of what it feels like. It will not give you the actual feeling. You are merely repeating words that someone else has told you. The description of something is not equivalent to the experience that comes from doing it yourself, as an experiencing subject. Reading a war journal about being in battle is not equivalent to the actual experience of being in battle.
To illustrate the point again: if we gathered ten people that all spoke different languages and gave them a hamburger, they would all gain the knowledge of what it feels like to eat a hamburger, even if none of them are able to communicate this to the others in language.
I can't keep repeating myself.
If I've understood you correctly, your objection is that this description is second hand, rather than being a description of the model's own feelings.
Like if I write a description of what it's like being a soldier in a war zone, despite never having been a soldier and never having been in a war zone. Perhaps I can write something plausible if I've read enough and use my imagination.
snakeboy (whose commend started this subthread) seems to claim that having real experiences (not just having learned of others' experiences through reading) is a prerequisite to creating something 'truly original'.
Is that your position also?
If so, is there any possible demonstration that could change your mind?
Like if I write a description of what it's like being a soldier in a war zone, despite never having been a soldier and never having been in a war zone. Perhaps I can write something plausible if I've read enough and use my imagination.
This is not an answer of what it feels like to be a soldier in a war zone. It is your guess. You do not know, you are imagining. It may be "plausible" for a novel, but that is not what we are talking about.
snakeboy (whose commend started this subthread) seems to claim that having real experiences (not just having learned of others' experiences through reading) is a prerequisite to creating something 'truly original'.
It would seem to imply that if you are creating something merely by reading others' work and synthesizing it, and then rearranging it into something else, all without actually using your own novel experience – then yes, it is not truly original. It is like writing a book about living in New York City by reading books about living in New York City. Your work is second-hand by definition.
Nobody did any original research, you didn't discover gravity, and you didn't participate in any historically significant events.
Yet we say that people who have been through education know about such things.
You may know every detail of the American Civil War, from every book ever written on the topic. You may read every journal from every person that wrote one about it.
You do not have firsthand knowledge of what it was like to participate in the war. Any assumption of that knowledge is a (false) generalization of what you think a person “would have thought or felt” based on contemporary ideas of the personality, psychology, etc. Reading a journal entry about a soldier seeing his comrade killed is not equivalent to actually having that experience yourself.
Of course not all works need to be this way, and many, many books are written about war by people that haven't been in it.
The broader point is that LLMs cannot have original experiences.
Stick a camera and a touch sensor on the machine, now it is experiencing the world.
Besides that, there is a lot of value in redigested experience. Quite a lot of history is only really examined in a larger context, where the person describing it cannot have experienced all the original events.
Implication is that virtually none of the novels ever written which include wars are actually original works, since vanishingly few novelists have been in active wars.
Maybe originality just doesn't mean much then?
Does reading an infinite number of cookbooks mean you know what the ingredients in each taste like?
In other words, when a real human needs to translate an experience into words to share it, A LOT of information is lost. The LLM might actually be better-suited for the the task in your example, even if the point you were driving at stands.
It's basically the Turing test.
Definitely agreed, but at least when talking about experience we've been stuck in this position for most of human history. How do I know what it's like to eat a hamburger? Perhaps, like the cute visual in Ratatouille there is a deep inner experience but (also like in Ratatouille) when I need to communicate that experience with another person I'm stuck relying on language, and the language is found lacking.
I know it's just a kid's cartoon, but interestingly Ratatouille was making this exact same point -- he really lacks any meaningful way to convey his inner experience. It's locked behind language. The film tackles this by showing an Remy's complex and interesting visual, but his friend only gets the fuzziest, dullest visual when he attempts to communicate it.
Remy's immediate rat & family peers actually _never_ get to understand his experience, and instead later help him out of love an allegiance.
The difference is huge. An LLM conversation can contain within it a batshit crazy model of the world and still produce a plausible stream of tokens. No skin in the game. If you don't test your ideas against reality, you don't have a model of reality; you have a model of written human thought. It's critical to understand the difference.