Why AI Seems Like it is Alive and Conscious

Not the Way We are, I'm Pretty Damn Sure 

(And why that hardly matters at all)

SARE!  (Simulacrum-Android-Replicant Effect)

R for Replicant

When "artificial" intelligence is based on a vast amalgam of human creations (everything on the Internet), it follows inescapably that AI is going to be very, very "human." When the tiny subtleties of meaning of every one of the trillions of words are influenced by the contexts in which they appear, it becomes possible to interpret how a given word is used very exactly. 

Take the word "simply," for instance.  In a context like "He simply doesn't get it," it has one coloration. In "Describe as simply as possible," it has another. Spread that principle over the 11 trillion words a modern LLM is trained on and voila! GPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, et al have what it takes to understand anything you say with very high accuracy, and to respond with insight. The bots sound very smart and very alive, conscious, and definitely non-mechanical.

Since everything humans do, say, write or think is colored by emotions (to say otherwise is to not understand the human animal), this vast sample of human discourse also reveals those colorations in all their wondrous variety. Back to "simply," you can hear the emotional difference in "That is simply stupid!" and "I will simply die if I lose!" The sample is so gigantic that pretty much every emotional coloration is seen and categorized for every word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, treatise, novel, poem, and ransom note in existence

Face it, it takes more than human genius to have that depth and breadth of understanding what words, phrases and sentences mean on both levels as does an LLM.  Frankly there are no geniuses who know it all for even one language.  Add in French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Indian, Chinese, Russian, Japanese and the other ~4600 languages in active use, and EGADS!... 

The Big OF COURSE

But the AIs have got it down. As planned, they reflect in minute detail all their learning about us. Thus the SARE effect. Of course they sound conscious; of course they sound emotional, of course they sound human. They are brilliantly created simulacra; soon they will embodied, first as robot brains then Android brains, then -- and we won't have to wait too long -- Blade Runner grade replicants that seem as human as Daryl Hannah and Rutger Hauer.

Still, until technology creates biological artificial brains, the AI's brains will always be in the hardware.  Obviously not like us. It's a philosophical conundrum whether they are now our fellow creatures just because they are in silico. I say it doesn't really matter. "Artificial" is not pejorative, it's descriptive.