Who Is Speaking When AI Says “I”?

Social Media Post - Transcript: 

AI is learning to sound like us, talk like us, even simulate our emotions. AI can say “I understand,” or “I feel that,” or “I’m here for you.” But who is the I behind those words?

Large Language Models—like the one behind ChatGPT are trained on massive datasets, but where are these data sets coming from? They are coming from books and articles written by humans, as well as human online interactions. It’s a fact we can not forget that AI is learning from a vast digital archive of all about human expressions. 

So if an AI responds with something that sounds warmth or wise to us,  or when it feels like a empathetic companion to us, It’s because we have trained it with our own human way to express love, empathy, sorrow, hope, creativity, spirituality, philosophy, political ideas, etc. 

Federico Faggin, one of the pioneers of the microprocessor, once said: “We cannot simulate selfhood, because It must be experienced from within.”

AI is an echo built from billions of human voices and memories stitched into code. Kinda like a collective mind fed by billions of human digital footprints. 

So here’s the question for us: If machines can look like us, sound like us, think like us, express ideas like us, imagine things like us - what, then, truly makes us… humans?

As the late Daniel Kahneman once said: “We are thinking machines. We are feeling machines that think”