this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2026
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I've seen this perspective a few times, feels wooly to me.
What definition of natural are you thinking of here?
Look a grow person is responsible and should be able to think for themselves. If a product tells you to go jump of a bridge i think we can agree, that we all would naturally question this. But if your dumb and already fell for stupid believes, maybe that's how it goes. Natural selection as in the smarter animal doesn't jump when called to, since it has a sense of self preservation. This person already had a learned stupidity of blind belief taught by her society so the fault and responsibility lies with them as well.
And yes ofc the ai should absolutely not do this kind of thing, but who knows what she prompted before it got to that, it had to be some weird shit.
I think there's a misunderstanding, I was asking about the distinction being drawn between natural and artificial.
Specifically in the comment to which I was replying.
As far as I know, there is no artificial selection in an evolutionary sense other than maybe selective breeding and genetic modifications etc. But natural selection refers ofc to darwin theory of evolution. So i would call it artificial, if there is a clear intent behind it, by someone, for example tge ai being designed to drive all believers to kill themselfs. But since this is a random occurance that was not intentional i don't think it categorizes as artificial selection.
Natural selection means "died before being able to reproduce". Darwin also specified sexual selection which means "unable (or less able) to find a mate or incapable (or less capable) of reproduction". Artificial selection is "humans intentionally fucked with their reproduction or genes to select for traits".
Ai could fall into any of the three depending on situation and perspective.
Ok, thanks for that.
The reason i ask this is because from my perspective I'm not sure anything humans do could be considered outside of nature.
We are part of it so anything we do is also part of it.
That's not to imply we aren't stupidly destructive sometimes, but even technology is still something we built, like tool-use apes or birds.
The difference is in magnitude, not in type.
There are plenty of creatures that affect the environment around them , with or without tool-use. Sometimes those actions destroy their own habitats, things like overpopulation or key resource exhaustion.
That we are currently the pinnacle of fucking up our own environment doesn't differentiate us from other natural creatures, other than scale.
Even the idea of sentience and sapience could be considered evolution of a sort.
Yes, we have greater understanding about our actions and the consequences, but that's only as a result of traits formed by evolutionary pressures, i wouldn't consider cognitive abilities to be outside of nature either.
To follow on from that, selective breeding, for instance, would still be natural selection because the environment in which is happens contains only natural elements.
People sometimes get upset at the idea that we aren't special enough to considered "above" or "outside" nature which i why i try and get their perspective first.
If I left a gun in the middle of the room with a bunch of kids thats natural selection too. I shouldnt be held responsible for willfully ignoring any saftey precautions. I shoulsnt even be held responsible for hyping up the kids before hand and telling them how in the future everyones going to have guns and its going to make the world a better place because they're so safe.
How did you get from natural selection to responsibility here , I'm not following the logic?
Perhaps that's not what your doing and you mean something else ?
I meant to reply to mango.
OK a couple of other more blatant examples to think about.
Do you think the Nazis killing around 800,000 Roma was natural selection?
Do you think the Tuskegee experiments were natural selection?
The relevance in this context, is that AI is a technology being aggressively forced on people by the most powerful in society.
Eugenicists love to appeal to nature to justify their actions.
In this case it was used consensually, not forced
As interesting as that may be, none of that is an answer to my question.
Your questions are all dumb
What definition of dumb are you thinking of here? Seems wooly to me.
This is also dumb
Yes I’m repeating what they said above so it better be
Don't repeat dumb stuff