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Agnieszka Piotrowska's new-found word, ‘techno-transference’, is beautifully apt for what she aims to describe – that is, the confusion between technology and a personal subjectivity. How could we know if something or someone is sentient? As she says succinctly, “Everything and everyone else gets evaluated based on comparisons to how humans work. We evaluate other animals with anthropomorphic lenses.” (p. It is true – when we talk to the cat, or even swear at our car, we transfer an anthropomorphic relation to a non-human entity and we do not adequately distinguish between human and non-human. Strictly speaking we cannot even know if other human beings are sentient, because. we only know one of them – just our own self.
Extraordinarily, Piotrowska found, online, a digital engineer with the belief that an AI machine was sentient. Though a digital engineer should know better, I have to say it is hard for anyone not conversant with digital mechanics to put aside our anthropomorphic lens. The simulation of human speech by AI is remarkable.
Some two years ago, I asked ChatGPT, ‘Do you yourself have emotional feelings?’ The response was:
As an AI language model, I do not have personal subjective experiences, emotions, or consciousness. I don't possess feelings or a sense of self. I am a program designed to process and generate human-like text based on patterns and algorithms, but I do not have genuine emotional experiences.
What does it mean that a non-subjective entity can generate human-like subjectivity? If it is so good at simulating, can we trust it when it denies human-like experience? Is it simulating a lie in that reply? And what is a simulated lie; what could that mean?
There is a deep issue of trust in us what we are told, and just now, I asked Google Gemini a similar question, to which it replied similarly:
As a large language model, I do not possess sentience. Sentience is typically defined as the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively. This includes