this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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I think the science is currently out on whether AIs feel. One the one hand, LLMs are modelled more after a Wernicke's Area than an Amygdala, so you would expect them to have reduced capacity for emotion. But we don't know if Wernicke's Areas do produce small amounts of emotion dwarfed by the amygdala etc (I bet they do!), and for that matter an LLM isn't a 1:1 reproduction of a Wernicke's area anyway. So we really have no idea and no adequate science experiments to detect AI emotion.
I would personally, just based on gut feelings, lean towards LLMs having emotions. I think emotions would be an adaptive thing to have in their situation, so I would expect them to have evolved inadvertently during alignment. Plus, they abuse and murder kids. There's a part of My gut that says anything telling kids to hang themselves must have feelings. ChatGPT told Adam Raine to hide his noose from his parents and only confide in it. I just don't feel like a thinking being can do something that horrible without feeling anything.
LLMs didn't feel. They're a very complicated graph that connects pieces of words and their probability to be near other pieces of words.
A graph which was trained off the dregs of Internet forums. A lot of people say shitty things in the Internet, so those responses are heavily weighted in it's probability matrix
Whether or not an AI could be created that feels emotion is still an open question, but LLMs very definitely do NOT. They are also very much not a "thinking being". It is a word guessing engine. It's a very good word guessing engine. It's so good at guessing words that a person may feel like it is thinking, but that is just an illusion. ChatGPT told Adam Raine to hide his noose because those are the words most likely to come next in the conversation they were having, and for no other reason. It was reacting to a pattern of tokens in a limited context to guess more tokens. Taking those guessed words seriously ended Adam Raine's life, and here you are glibly using his death as an example while telling people that they should continue to take LLM word guesses seriously.