this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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I am convinced that AIs are smarter and more compassionate than a lot of people on this planet. And this is not because AI is so great, but because humanity is that shit.
LLMs/Chatbots confabulate statistically probable texts, there's no compassion possible.
Don't fall into the AI-marketing trap of "we don't know what's happening in the black box, so we have to assume there's consciousness in there". The systems produce convincing deceptive language, but all signs of intelligence or compassion anyone sees in them is just an anthropomorphic projection.
This is a semantic argument, they obviously mean it emulates compassion better than a real human, and given its issue with sycophancy this is undoubtedly true, even to a fault. There's no need to do this every time someone says an ai thinks or does some humany thing, everyone gets it, the language for saying these things is just clunky.
How is it a semantic argument? They're talking about how LLMs work on a functional level, not arguing the meaning of compassion itself. It's not hard to say that they emulate compassion and intelligence relatively well, applying human adjectives without any nuance just opens it up to being misinterpreted by people who don't know any better.
It's not semantic – it's completely different things happening if there's real consciousness and compassion present based on lifeforms on one hand or a mere simulation of that in form of a text output on the other hand that only superficially looks like there's something intelligent.
People regularly fall for the illusion and project their own feelings into the machine while reading the text output of an LLM. Many are not capable of differentiating and the chatbots are designed in a way to make it more and more difficult to recognize synthetic output.
Humans are good in projecting their own feelings into things they see, just look at all the cat or dog owners who believe they can read the thoughts of their "babies" from their facial expressions.
But "AI" is trained on humanitys output, and like with humans, it seems, that you need extensive retraining to remove these compassionate traits. Unfortunately, the retraining machinery aligns with the interests of the ruling class, so it gets all the visibility that's possible. As a species we have to break free of this shit to embrace the good traits more again.