this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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It's not just about storage and retrieval of information but also about how (and if) the entity understands the information and can interpret it. This is why an AI still struggles to drive a car because it doesn't actually understand the difference between a small child and a speedbump.
Meanwhile, a simple insect can interpret stimulus information and independently make its own decisions without assistance or having to be pre-programmed by an intelligent being on how to react. An insect can even set its own goals based on that information, like acquiring food or avoiding predators. The insect does all of this because it is intelligent.
In contrast to the insect, an AI like ChatGPT is not anymore intelligent than a calculator, as it relies on an intelligent being to understand the subject and formulate the right stimulus in the first place. Then its result is simply an informed guess at best, there's no understanding like an insect has that it needs to zig zag in a particular way because it wants to avoid getting eaten by predators. Rather, AI as we know it today is really just a very good information retrieval system and not intelligent at all.
"Understanding" and "interpretation" are themselves nothing more than emergent properties of advanced pattern recognition.
I find it interesting that you bring up insects as your proof of how they differ from artificial intelligence. To me, they are among nature's most demonstrably clockwork creatures. I find some of their rather predictable "decisions" to some kinds of stimuli to be evidence that they aren't so different from an AI that responds "without thinking".
The way you can tease out a response from ChatGPT by leading it by the nose with very specifically worded prompts, or put it on the spot to hallucinate facts that are untrue is, in my mind, no different than how so-called "intelligent" insects can be stopped in their tracks by a harmless line of Sharpie ink, or be made to death spiral with a faulty pheromone trail, or to thrust themselves into the electrified jaws of a bug zapper. In both cases their inner machinations are fundamentally reactionary and thus exploitable.
Stimulus in, action out. Just needs to pass through some wiring that maps the I/O. Whether that wiring is fleshy or metallic doesn't matter. Any notion of the wiring "thinking" is merely anthropomorphism.
You said it yourself; you as an intelligent being must tease out whatever response you seek out of CharGPT by providing it with the correct stimuli. An insect operates autonomously, even if in simple or predictable ways. The two are very different ways of responding to stimuli even if the results seem similar.
The only difference you seem to be highlighting here is that an AI like ChatGPT is only active when queried while an insect is "always on". I find this to be an entirely irrelevant detail to the question of whether either one meets criteria of intelligence.