All this talk of who or what is AI – a person or a thing – is the great question of our age.
Was/is Frankenstein a person? Cinderella, Pinocchio, Trump? Okay, we may have to concede that “The Donald” is a person, but with great similarities to Pinocchio who is not. Both have deep resistance to truth.
Last month, Trump found a new name for artificial intelligence, with his launch of a “super intelligence” agency to deal with the effects of AI. Typical. “Super” is so much more superlative (and Trumpian) than “artificial”.
But, to the overwhelming question: does AI have a soul? Is it a person?
RM Block
Who better to ask than AI itself. So I did.
I asked ChatGPT, which knows, like Dana, all kinds of everything, whether AI has a soul. Its answer was immediate and pithy: “There is no good evidence that AI has a soul.” It added, helpfully, “I can talk about the soul, but I don’t have evidence that I possess one.” Such candour.
However, and somewhat disturbingly, it added: “Whether AI could have a soul is a different question, because that depends on what you mean by ‘soul’.”
In Christianity, it said: “A soul is not simply intelligence or consciousness. Human beings are understood as having a spiritual dimension created by God. Current AI systems have no established spiritual status, and there is no church teaching that AI possess a soul.”
[ No, you don’t need AI to read your child a bedtime storyOpens in new window ]
Moving to the secular domain, it continued that some philosophers “would ask whether a sufficiently conscious artificial system could eventually qualify as a person. We don’t currently know whether an AI system is conscious in the subjective sense.”
It added, however, that scientifically there is “no test that has demonstrated that an AI has subjective experience, an inner life, or anything analogous to a soul”.
Then, most endearingly, it said: “I can discuss souls, consciousness, God and personal identity convincingly, but that doesn’t mean there is an experiencing ‘self’ behind the words. I generate responses rather than experiencing them as a human does.”
My immediate response to such abject humility was to hug the machine, but it proved difficult to embrace a screen.
There you have it. AI is a magnificent machine. At our service, unless we decide otherwise.
Soul, from Old English “sawol”, for “spiritual and emotional part of a person”.
