Machine Subjectivity
If you’ve used chatGPT or other LLMs (Large Language Models), you will quickly realize that the knowledge and interactions distilled from these AIs are not quite what you would get from a human being. There are many missing pieces, but one that is crucial is the subjective experience machines seem to lack ( referred to as Machine Subjectivity ), and that is the topic for this overview.
Subjective Experiences.
At their core, subjective experiences are individual and mostly private events. Most of us know that fire is hot because we have experienced firsthand the heat from it. An LLM hasn’t felt heat or much else as it lacks heat sensors and thus derives the knowledge from a corpus of text where fire is mentioned as being hot.
We’ll come back to this point, but by their very nature, subjective experiences can generate different results from the same stimulus. Two people can go to the beach, be presented with the same stuff: sand, breeze, sun, bathing people, seagulls, the ocean, etc., and come to a completely different conclusion. For one, the experience was pleasant, and for the other, it was unnerving or even horrible.
