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A Microsoft researcher built a goat-powered LLM in Age of Empires II to prove it's not sentient
(www.xda-developers.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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By the same logic, you could prove that we are not sentient.
Engineers need to stop trying to do the job of philosophers. LLMs are not sentient, but that tells us nothing about what gives rise to sentience or whether silicon is a substrate that could host a sentient consciousness.
I'm still not convinced most people I speak to at work are sentient.
Nah, they are sentient, but they have learned that acting sentient is hardly a profitable asset in many cases.
Mindlessly babbling credible sounding stuff in constant shameless bluffing, that's the way to get ahead.
So now that tech has made a constant shameless bluffing technology, it's no wonder the same people that live that way are super excited.
I'm pretty sure many of them, when they get home and close the door behind them, they just stare at the wall until it's time to go out again.
Have you tried working with goats from Age of Empires though?
They are probably sentient. Now sapience.. is another issue altogether.
big issue is that "Scentience" is a vibes based definition. I don't think we have a working definition that we can use.
in the past it was argued (engire global economy based on) that black people weren't scientient.
The annoying part is that now, "what is scientience" isn't an abstract esoteric philosophical question. but a material question we are ignoring with serious real life implications.
I majored in Philosophy. Though I wouldn't want to be an AI ethics consultant for one of these big companies because I imagine that whatever I write down would have to preserve profits (first and foremost) and then gaslight everyone into thinking it's all perfectly ethical and okay and no one (including mother earth) is being harmed in the process.
You don't need an ethicist if you don't have ethics! /s
I just wish we could put this dumb sentient AI stuff to bed for now. Congrats, you guys built the most powerful (and wasteful) auto-complete. It's not sentient and your marketing doesn't have to be hyperbolic lies.
They don't need to hire an AI ethics consultant, they'll just have the AI do that!
honest question to a philosophy major, why is it so clear cut to you that LLMs are not sentient? what is missing in current systems?
Protip, never ask a Phil major questions, unless you want them to pose more questions. I think the very question itself assumes we can even properly define sentience. If we can, why does it have value as a result? Your home computer may not be sentient, but it's pretty smart, valuable, and could potentially have an equally large impact on the world (not sure about intentionality though). It's not that I'm certain no LLM is sentient (though I'm pretty sure) as much as I see greedy people steering the hype to their benefit in order to exploit others. The whole thing is manufactured to cheapen humanity in comparison to tech. I am very opinionated so you may see it differently.
Can you build a human from goats in AOE2?
For this proof to work, you'd have to prove that you can't. And we can simulate whole worm brains and fly brains, and they behave like real in simulated worlds, so you'd have to prove that there's something different about humans. This paper doesn't offer anything like that.
An average human? No. A lemmy.world user? Yes.
Yeah, fuck those idiots for joining when it was the only instance accepting new members
Haha, I'm still trying to decide if the upvotes and downvotes here are going after the sarcasm or the dumb literal take. Snort
I have no knowledge of this drama or hard feelings for your instance in either direction.
But was that ever a thing? I joined a month after you and there where options plenty.
It was absolutely a thing right when the 3P app reddit fiasco happened. Everybody was scrambling, and I'm not surprised that there were tons more options even just a month later, but at the time everyone else was completely overloaded. I tried signing up for as many instances as I could find, and lemmy.world was the only one that wasn't shitting the bed with new registrations.
I just found out I'm scum on lemmy woot! Who knew people didn't like certain instances, are some better than others? Like do you get better info faster? Or is this pure sarcasm?
No instances are liked in general, but the Canadian and Australian ones aren't disliked by anyone in particular
Are we discriminating against instances now? Is this a thing?
Sweetie, that was a thing before your instance existed.
That kind of sucks ngl
For the record, at least one Nobel Prize winner disagrees about LLM sentience
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IkdziSLYzHw
A lot of nobel laureates believe/believed a lot of unhinged nonsense. Some of my favorites:
Linus Pauling thought overdosing on vitamin C could cure all kinds of medical problems
James Watson and William Shockley were eugenicists
Irving Langmuir believed large-scale weather manipulation was possible with the technology available in the 1970s
Luc Montagnier was really into homeopathy and spread COVID vaccine/5G conspiracy theories
Kary Mullis denied that HIV causes AIDS
Just winning a Nobel doesn't automatically make someone right about everything, even in their own field.
Exactly!