So which of us are p-zombies? We’ve encountered the same problem by suggesting that human beings have consciousness or self awareness, or get what qualia are, except we can’t prove that anyone has any of these things. The difference of AI consciousness within its development community is a sorites paradox. Large AI packages like GPT-4 have more awareness than previous versions, but not as much awareness as humans. But it Chat GPT4 does exceed human control subjects in the Turing test.

Mind you the Turing is only one of several tests we use to rate how advanced AI is, but we can’t be sure even when an AI can make coffee given a machine and supplies, and construct flat-packed furniture given the IKEA visual instructions, that this counts as AGI, or is sentient.

Right now, there are artists who use generative AI to create art, and it is as much really art as photography was really art when illustrators were complaining they are just using a machine to replicate a real scene. As much as music production and music synthesis are art.

Now yes, I get that AI presents risks of workers losing income and their capacity to survive, but every time we toss our sabots into the gearworks to break the machines, we’re kicking overthrow of the system down the line, until we’re where we are today, not only looking at the dissolution of our democracy so that industrialists may continue to exist, but also the destruction of our habitat, because we can’t address what makes them money.

So capitalism is going to end you either way, unless you end it first. And I expect if you actually tried to make a fortune on your art, you would eventually find yourself selling out all your rights to one of the big corporate controllers, and they would own everything you did, and pay you a pittance for it… Unless you are James Hetfield kind of skilled and lucky. Somehow I doubt you are.

What about a cat, or a person who’s different from you? It’s just as impossible to prove, and yet…

I mean, yes?

That’s very pithy, but the material used as training data was probably produced by artists attempting to create art using tools (ai and otherwise), as well as more mundane data designed and produced by humans with no ai tools and some produced by humans with almost exclusively ai tools.