Will synthetic intelligence be sooner or later endowed with feelings? | EUROtoday

On Apr 9, 2025

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En 2022, Blake Lemoine, a man-made intelligence researcher (IA) at Google, was dismissed after reporting that the AI on which he labored had developed feelings. According to him, the LAMDA mannequin (Language Model for Dialog Applications) had proven a type of sentience.

It will not be the primary time that AI has aroused debates by itself feelings and people it could trigger. In 1964, Eliza, a conversational robotic created on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which was content material to reformulate the sentences of customers in query, had created deep attachments in sure sufferers who went as far as to entrust their private issues as a therapist.

Fall in love along with her chatbot

But immediately we now have crossed a milestone: present AI can communicate of affection for hours in a fancy and nuanced method. Unlike the well-known Turing check, AI not pretending to be human, however they dialogue with typically disturbing finesse, to the purpose that some fall in love with their chatbot or commit suicide to affix them. If AI can now give the phantasm of actual interiority, can we are saying that they perceive what they’re speaking about?

In the movie Her (2013), the principle character has a romantic relationship with an AI named Samantha. When she tells the hero performed by Joaquin Phoenix ” You woke me up », She claims to have been born to the awareness of her sexual desire, while regretting not having a body.

Read too “The gaze of Aurea”: a beautiful love story around the dangers of AIFor Yann Le Cun, scientific director of Meta AI and winner of the Turing Prize, the next generations of AI will have to have emotions. To do this, he plans to enrich textual representations by multimodal models dealing with images, videos and sounds to produce “World Models” allowing robots to interact with their environment.

In the vision of Le Cun, the “feelings” of AI would not be subjective feelings like those of Samantha, but adaptive mechanisms transforming his perception according to the stimuli received. This pragmatic conception of emotions would allow an understanding oriented towards action and would offer the AI a path to exceed its current limits.

Bovary AI

However, the only thing that is lacking in AI to understand emotions a body? The embodied AI, for example in a robot, could then be found in the same situation as the famous heroine of Gustave Flaubert, Emma Bovary: while having a body, she would know passion, love and desire that through the novels she has read.

Read too Will we soon do love with robots? As Flaubert wrote: “Emma sought to know what we heard precisely in life by the phrases of bliss, ardour and intoxication, which had appeared so lovely in books. »Emma will finally confront her representations with actual experiences – she’s going to reside concretely passions, needs and disappointments -, however her profession reveals exactly that it isn’t a lot the physique that counts that lived expertise.

Emma was capable of get out of her bovaryism due to her potential to behave on the earth and instantly expertise the sensations, feelings and penalties of her actions. Will AI be capable of do the identical?

Burn ache

This leads us to a deeper query: what’s expertise, and to what extent can or not it’s simulated? The lived expertise implies an immersion in time – a succession of moments which can be linked and remodel into included recollections. However, this temporal dimension is missing at AI, whose “memories” are solely information processed and saved, with out lived continuity.

Read too Obsession in love or suicide: when AI interferes in privatenessCan an exhaustive description of an expertise, nonetheless detailed, substitute the expertise itself? Even if an AI had all of the potential representations of the ache of a burn, the enjoyment of a start or in love ecstasy, which may not be sufficient to provide start to an actual understanding. Understanding will not be solely manipulating symbols: it’s incorporating into time and area what these states imply.

To uncover

The kangaroo of the day

Answer

Will AI be capable of attain this stage sooner or later? In the meantime, Samantha stays condemned to be solely a simulator of feelings, trapped in a library with out door or window.

* Louis Abraham is an knowledgeable in synthetic intelligence and teaches Sciences Po.

https://www.lepoint.fr/high-tech-internet/l-intelligence-artificielle-sera-t-elle-un-jour-dotee-d-emotions-09-04-2025-2586953_47.php