AI as artificial animals and persons

Summary

The topic frames AI as the engineering of artificial animals and, in some contexts, artificial persons—systems that may not literally be biological creatures, but that can appear to behave like animals or like human persons when placed in the right settings. Because these goals concern what kinds of beings (or seeming beings) can be constructed, they attract significant philosophical attention, including arguments about whether such goals are attainable. On the constructive side, AI draws on formal tools long developed in philosophy, such as logic (including first-order and intensional logics), inductive and probabilistic reasoning, and planning/practical reasoning. The discussion also highlights that AI’s “personhood” ambitions are often evaluated through operational tests (notably the Turing Test), which attempt to define intelligence by behavior—especially linguistic indistinguishability from humans—rather than by internal mental states. Finally, the topic emphasizes that while AI has produced impressive narrow successes (e.g., game-playing and question answering), it has not achieved general intelligence or robust “artificial person” capabilities. Major human-relevant capacities—especially subjective consciousness and creativity—are described as largely missing from mainstream AI frameworks, raising concerns about whether current AI approaches truly capture what it means to build artificial persons rather than merely artificial animals.

Key Points

• 1

  AI aims to build artificial systems that can appear to be animals or, in suitable contexts, artificial persons.

• 2

  AI’s philosophical roots include logic, probabilistic reasoning, and planning; operational tests like the Turing Test are used to define intelligence behaviorally.

• 3

  Despite successes in narrow domains, AI has not achieved general intelligence, and key human-like traits such as subjective consciousness and creativity remain largely unaddressed.