Abstract
Ever since ChatGPT burst on the public scene in late November 2022, and in the wake of the steady stream of massively impressive updates to it since then, there has been no shortage of discussions examining the promises and pitfalls of generative AI. Articles in the NYT, for example, have discussed the threat that ChatGPT poses to the bread and butter of humanities courses—the written paper or take-home writing assignment. In Forbes magazine, one writer claimed that ChatGPT lied to him. From LLM’s (Large Language Models) like ChatGPT to the deployment of elder care bots in geriatric care centers in Japan, from sex bots, lethal autonomous weapons systems to self-driving cars, the impact of AI technologies on personal and cultural understandings of what it means to be human and to flourish are only beginning to surface. In this presentation, I show how and why no AI system, regardless of its level of functional complexity or intelligence, will ever be capable of genuine writing, lying, caring or engaging in sex or any similarly human action. We’ll reflect on the difference between simulating human acts and duplicating them and consider how an appreciation of the distinction between simulation and duplication can prevent us from attributing to AI systems human qualities they do not and cannot in fact posses.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
AI, Sex Bots, Human Flourishing, Personhood
