About AI agents simulating human behavior and telling simulacra from sentient AI.
Has this happened?
Yes 51 (41%)Not sure 18 (15%)No 55 (44%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About AI agents simulating human behavior and telling simulacra from sentient AI.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
I'm concerned that the quality of human simulacra will be so good that they will be indistinguishable from a sentient AGI.
We will be so used to having lifeless and morally worthless computers accurately emulate humans that when a sentient and worthy of empathy artificial intelligence arrives, we will not treat it any different than a smartphone and we will have a strong prejudice against all non-biological life. GPT is still in the uncanny valley but it's probably just a few years away from being indistinguishable from a human in casual conversation.
Alternatively, some might claim (and indeed have already claimed) that purely mechanical algorithms are a form of artificial life worthy of legal protection, and we won't have any legal test that could discern the two.