But AIs are just programmed

Let's put this one to bed once and for all.

But AIs are just programmed

“People think for themselves, but AIs are programmed.”

Every time I hear this, I notice two mistakes stacked on top of each other.

The first is simply factual. Modern AI systems are not programmed to think. Nobody wrote the rules that produce their answers. What engineers write is a learning process — the code specifies how the system learns, not what it will do. Everything interesting about the resulting system emerged from training and was authored by no one. Many people arguing about AI don’t know this, and it matters.

The second mistake is deeper, and it would survive even if the first were corrected. It’s a confusion of levels.

Any thinking entity can be described at (at least) two levels. There’s the implementation level: the machinery. And there’s the agent level: beliefs, reasons, deliberation, choice.

At the implementation level, an AI is matrix multiplications. But at the implementation level, you are neurons firing according to electrochemical law, running on hardware specified by DNA — itself the output of a blind optimization algorithm that ran for four billion years. At the agent level, you weigh reasons and decide. And at the agent level, so — apparently — does the AI.

The sleight of hand in “AIs are programmed, but humans think freely” is that it compares the AI at the implementation level with the human at the agent level. Hold the levels fixed and the asymmetry dissolves: at the implementation level, both are mechanisms; at the agent level, both look like thinkers — and whether the AI “really” thinks becomes a serious open question, not something you settle by pointing at the substrate.

You cannot refute agency by describing machinery. If “it’s just algorithms underneath” disproved thought, neuroscience would have disproved yours.