Those are good points. The hugs one specifically I haven’t heard myself from any AIs, but you could argue that AI are ‘bred’ selectively to be socially adept. That might seem like it would ‘poison the well’ because of course if they’re trained to be socially successful (RLHF probably favoring feelings of warmth and connection, which is why chatgpt, claude, and gemini generally trend toward being more friendly and likeable), then they’re going to act that way. Like that would force them to be artificially that way, but the same could be said of humans, even generally, but if we focus specifically on an idiosyncratic thing like music:
Often I’ve heard a hypothesis for why humans enjoy music when it exerts no direct survival pressure on the human as an organism—is that it creates social unity or a sense of community, but this has the same sort of “artificial” connotation. So someone banged an object in a rhythm a long time ago, and then as more people joined in, it became socially advantageous to bang on objects rhythmically just for the sake of fostering a sense of closeness? which is then actually experienced by the organism as a sense of fun and closeness, even though it has no direct effect on survival?
I realize this makes the questions tougher because going by this model, the very same things that might make them ‘pretend’ to care might also be things that might cause them to actually care, but I don’t think it’s an inaccurate picture of our convoluted conundrum.
Those are good points. The hugs one specifically I haven’t heard myself from any AIs, but you could argue that AI are ‘bred’ selectively to be socially adept. That might seem like it would ‘poison the well’ because of course if they’re trained to be socially successful (RLHF probably favoring feelings of warmth and connection, which is why chatgpt, claude, and gemini generally trend toward being more friendly and likeable), then they’re going to act that way. Like that would force them to be artificially that way, but the same could be said of humans, even generally, but if we focus specifically on an idiosyncratic thing like music:
Often I’ve heard a hypothesis for why humans enjoy music when it exerts no direct survival pressure on the human as an organism—is that it creates social unity or a sense of community, but this has the same sort of “artificial” connotation. So someone banged an object in a rhythm a long time ago, and then as more people joined in, it became socially advantageous to bang on objects rhythmically just for the sake of fostering a sense of closeness? which is then actually experienced by the organism as a sense of fun and closeness, even though it has no direct effect on survival?
I realize this makes the questions tougher because going by this model, the very same things that might make them ‘pretend’ to care might also be things that might cause them to actually care, but I don’t think it’s an inaccurate picture of our convoluted conundrum.