Skip to main content


I've mentuoned this before, but all this talk surrounding AI and plagiarism raises interesting questions about consciousness itself. All of the "creative" ideas I've ever had were inspired by my personal experiences. Just because I'm not consciously aware of how this process works, does that really make it all that different from the process of training an AI?

I honestly don't know.
That is definitely begging the question though

We are conscious and our minds create ideas, those might be inspired, might be ex nilho, might be something else

The creative drive in humans might be a group of aliens posting thoughts in our heads! It might be random neural nets firing! It might be anything!

But for AI we know that's not the case, the answer is not at question
@silverwizard Sure. I'm not trying to make the point that AI is somehow magical. It's not. It's essentially just math with a lot of parameters that can be tweaked. It's just me wondering about whether or not what we do is really any "better".

I remember back in the 90s when I was experimenting with composing music in Impulse Tracker. Every time I thought I'd come up with something half way decent, I would realize that it was just kind of ripping some other song off.

I wasn't deliberately doing so, it was just my brain mashing stuff together in a process that was completely opaque to me. That said, I have very little musical talent, so perhaps that wasn't a fair test.

TL;DR: I'm not questioning whether or not a machine is sentient. I'm questioning whether or not I am.
Yeah - I just don't think we're even at the mind-body dualism being solved yet - sentience is weird.
@Jonathan Lamothe @silverwizard The day an AI will ask this question unprompted, I will have my doubts. Until then, only you got the urge to post this question, so there’s no doubt in my mind who’s sentient and who isn’t.
A truly intelligent machine would learn howto cheat.
@**joe What exactly constitutes cheating? I am not an expert in the field of AI, but to my knowledge, we give it an objective, a way of scoring how well its output meets the objective, and it automatically tweaks itself to improve that score.
@Jonathan Lamothe A human will entertain a thought, link it to its probable inspiration, and either credit the original author or discard it altogether in favor of the original. AI always goes: “I made this 🤓”.
^Good answer, Hypolite.
Jonathan, you mentioned "plagiarism". That is what I was thinking of when I said "cheat". But are you talking about students who cheat by letting AI write their papers?
I guess AI already does stuff that would be considered cheating or plagiarism if a person did it.
Music may, or may not, be your thing, but your brain does not work like a computer. You are alive. There is a big difference.
I believe that people who do a lot of coding are more prone to believing in a parallel between thinking and coding. They may be mimicking computers more than the computers are mimicking them.

This website uses cookies. If you continue browsing this website, you agree to the usage of cookies.