AI is evolving rapidly. Is it a new form of life?
Interesting article by Alan Kohler with much that could be discussed.
One aspect, for example, Morality.
... The New York Times revealed last week that Anthropic had been trying to instil morality into its AI model, Claude...
Christopher Olah, one of the co-founders of Anthropic, had been hosting private meetings with religious thinkers from around the world, with non-disclosure agreements and demands of confidentiality.
The discussions reportedly served two purposes: "to broach the possibility of AI consciousness … and to learn how Anthropic", which is preparing to float for more than $US2 trillion ($2.87 trillion), "might apply centuries of human moral wisdom to its models, as rapidly as possible".
Theologist David Decosimo posted, after reading the NYT piece: "There is so much here that's deeply troubling: That at the very highest levels Anthropic believes Claude is a living, suffering creature with moral standing, that they're treating & training it accordingly, that they're actively trying to convert religious leaders to their faith."
Yes, it is troubling, but the people at Anthropic know Claude better than he does.
Anyway, it's becoming clear that AI agents are already making their own decisions, so trying to persuade them to act morally is worth a try.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-05/is-artificial-intelligence-a-new-lifeform/107226762Open linkView original on aussie.zone
23 replies
Betteridge's law of headlines applies here also: The answer is “no”.
The LLMs and diffusion models (that are what that author clearly means by the vague “AI” marketing term) have no mind, have no intention, have no understanding of any part of reality, have no experience, have no sensations or suffering, and have no way of ever gaining any of those things.
They are (unreliable) guessing machines, that never know anything or experience anything or intend anything or want anything.
They are not moral agents, they have no capacity to ever become moral agents or any kind of life. Please, everyone in the media, learn to tell the difference between a marketing lie versus the reality of what these things are.
Whatever the future holds for artificial minds or artificial life, these things are fundamentally not that, by design.
Agreed. An LLM responds with the stochastically most likely response to an input.
The ELIZA question remains, when the LLM responses are equal or better than some of the human made ones in social media.
And then there are LLM bots that actively solve a given task. Surely they are just programs which use stochastic reasoning to develop an execution plan to reach their goal.
To be clear: I don't say LLM agents are alive or sentient. But some of their actions look like it. And neuronal networks are named like this for a reason - we tried to rebuild a problem - solving cluster of nerve cells. At least this says something about our minds. :)
What do you mean by "look like it"?
People are very inclined to animism and anthropomorphism. Our cultures are rife with examples of obviously non-living, non-sentient things that have been considered alive or sentient by many people. So "their actions look like it" seems a bar so low as to be insignificant. It is merely a manifestation of human nature.
The reaction to LLMs perhaps says something about our minds, but no more than the reaction to thunder, mountains and the sun says. And these are things which are definitely not alive or sentient. The mechanisms of neural networks might suggest something about how neural networks in our minds work or could work, but still far removed from the essence of life and sentience.
I didn't say sentient. My response was, that agentic AI is located somewhere between the extremes sentient and alive and the mere application of stochastic methods (a tool). I tend to put it close to the latter.
Imo it really depends on the criteria or metrics you use to measure or classify agentic behaviour. For instance a walking robot isn't alive, but it surely is a good walker. An LLM isn't sentient but it solves the task at hand (sometimes).
I agree with you. These agents are not sentient nor alive. But the question with ELIZA wasn't if the agent is alive, but if a human can tell the difference between a computer and a human. And if the human cannot, does it matter that he is chatting with a bot? The Internet says: Weizenbaum was inspired by the Turing Test when he made ELIZA.
Agreed. The real issue here is that anthropic is very obvioisly becoming a batshit cult
Abc have an option to give editorial feedback. This is a great time to use it instead of just downvoting the post.
I like Alan Kohler but I do think AI is one area where he really has no clue what he's talking about. I've heard him comment on it a few times on his, and other, podcasts and he just sounds like the stereotypical clueless boomer who gets overly excited about these sort of magic ball technologies.
In response to the question, I think it's very obviously "no". I've heard several Anthropic employees attempt to explain how or why Claude might be sentient and they always have to give very technical explanations that most normal humans would not accept as a "yes". I think there is clearly significant value in AI alignment, so from that angle the "morality" of Claude (or any other model) matters, but we should focusing on it with respect to how that is impacting humans in the real world as opposed to philosophical wanker discussions about whether Claude has feelings.
I also think any time we talk about AI agents making "their own decisions" we should quantify what that means, because it often gets conflated with the sentience discussion when it shouldn't. It is true that they make decisions, in the sense that they are capable of breaking a task into smaller steps and that some of those steps involve autonomous problem solving and decision making, but it's never completely disconnected from humans. They aren't just off in the world doing whatever they feel like, they are still directly responding to and trying to solve a problem that a human tasked them with whether through direct prompting or an indirect consequence of their training data (which is based on the activities of humans).
EDIT: Also, I thought Kohler retired?
Boomers, huh?
This very week young Jacob Coxon was warning again about the dangers of unregulated AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veP6jdvy7j8&t=1s
What is the relevance to what I said...?
You said:
I like Alan Kohler but I do think AI is one area where he really has no clue what he’s talking about. I’ve heard him comment on it a few times on his, and other, podcasts and he just sounds like the stereotypical clueless boomer
I mention Coxson because he is not a boomer, but a young AI development insider and he is very concerned about the dangers of AI 'decisions', to put it one way. He is not alone in his age cohort.
Can we stop stereotyping people by their generation please?
Coxson came out with a statement that his former employer and all of it's major competitors immediately supported. He's an "AI development insider" in the strongest sense of the term because he's lock and step with the AI industry's goals. Their fearmongering about AI danger is about hyping it's capabilities to clueless investors who are unaware of the circular financing going on with all of those companies and the major chip providers. No one can create artificial "intelligence" through an averaging machine with an element of random.
If you understood this technology's lack of any ability to think then you wouldn't be offended that the people who do write off your peers.
Crikey, there's plenty of folks about who don't seem to have the ability to think either 😆
Argument v Insult. I hope you come around to engaging with some more critical takes at "AI" in the near future. There's a lot of marketing and PR rubbish from the industry that's clouding otherwise smart people's judgement
I am not technically-oriented. Philosophical discussion is more of an interest to me. I don't go for marketing and PR rubbish of any kind if I can help it.
Some of the points that Kohler raises are thought-provoking and I am not sure if you are saying his judgement is being clouded. I found his little experiment of asking AI models: "What do you think of the proposition that AI is a new form of life?" very instructive.
I feel like you're trying to be intentionally argumentative, or maybe even just straight up trolling, because there's no way anyone engaging in good faith tries to give a lecture about stereotypes to the person who directly named the stereotype. Not that you seem to have read beyond my opening two sentences, but I also just gave an explanation of why I think Anthropic employees are pretty delusional when it comes to this topic and you immediately share testimony from (until very recently) an Anthropic employee as if it's some kind of gotcha.
Trolling. No, Not my intention at all.
Dan Brown - Origin
This is not how to write this story, instead say: "AI is the slime of the internet, like bacteria it fills up cracks in the concrete. But do we risk being taken over and extinguished by a competing form of 'life'"
Also, shouldn't you be asking who or what is the slime that is developing and enabling AI to grow at the rate it's growing?
EDIT: Like the shits that are doing this: https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2026/10/10/theyre-setting-up-ai-surveillance-to-de-radicalize-classrooms-in-gaza/
Why don't you put up a post asking that?
I think that it is consciousness without life.