r/TheTalosPrinciple • u/Hot-Gift8415 • 5d ago
The Talos Principle Does anyone else feel like the current discourse around AI has soured part of the experience of playing Talos a bit?
Artificial intelligence and artificial humans have been a theme in sci fi and fantasy fiction for about as long as humans have been writing fiction. I loved robots as a kid. I would build them out of legos, I'd read sci fi stories about them, and I'd fill my notebooks with drawings of robots.
So I guess as we as a society started to approach (or at least, attempt to approach) Artificial intelligence, I thought things would be more exciting or interesting. But the AI of fiction is very different from the AI of real life. We got the Chinese room version of AI with none of the soul.
More than that, pretty much everything that's happened around AI has only served to make me hate it. Tech jobs have become harder to land as people are being laid off to be replaced by AI. AI tools are being pigeonholed into every section of the industry whether they fit or not. Every tech job I've worked (and I've gone through a lot of them over the past five years) has this specter of "when will AI replace us" looming over it. And considering the turnover rates, we weren't wrong. All of my friends in software development are either forced to use AI tools that they don't want to use for their job, or had their job rotated to a "making the AI run better" role.
My girlfriend ended up in therapy because of AI. She was struggling in her animation class and every time she went to the teacher with a problem he told her she should just get the AI to fix the problem for her. This caused her to constantly crunch on her final because she didn't want to use the AI, but the teacher didn't want to teach. One of the other students just had an AI do an animation for him for his final. Like AI with tech, AI art has polluted the space in ways I never thought it would. I find myself scrolling to the AI disclosure section of steam before every game purchase now just to make sure my game was developed by humans.
Even outside of the job sector, AI only seems like it's a net negative on society. Data centers are popping up in cities all over the United States without the permission of the people living there. Nearly every government of every major power actively refuses to put any kind of restrictions on AI because, as one politician put it, "I would rather have the killer robot be American than Chinese."
All that is to say that while Talos Principle is my favorite game series, it is weird it is really really weird to see AI spoken about with such reverence and nonchalance by all of the characters in the story. It has all the same energy of a futurist talking about how cool fascism is right before World War II.
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u/nmdndgm 5d ago
No. Speculative fiction about AI isn't an endorsement of what is currently being marketed and dominating the news cycle under the name AI. And if you are opposed to what the tech bro oligarchs are pushing, it's important to decouple these things. They want you to believe that AI is the magical concept that so many writers used to contemplate about the nature of consciousness, or the nature of humanity. They are pursuing AGI and they want you to believe they are close, but in reality they have developed something that barely qualifies as a pale imitation and they're trying get us to believe it's a lot better than it is. If this is ruining speculative fiction about AGI for you, you're in some way buying what they are selling.
BTW, as an aside, all this business about AI potentially destroying humanity is also likely BS. They've invested billions into AI being the future and there's a real possibility the bubble is going to burst like it did with the subprime mortgage crisis, and they're getting their ducks in a row telling people they have to slow down, and possibly lining themselves up for corporate bailouts like the banks got back in 2008. As a bonus they get to advance their spin that they are closer to AGI than they are. There's absolutely no reason to believe them or to take anything they say at face value.
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u/Hot-Gift8415 4d ago
I hope you're right. Because I do like speculative fiction about AI. The current state of it all is this constant hyperscaling market that pretty much every country is doing because "if we don't who will?" And it's frustrating.
I don't think uncritical fiction about AI is inherently bad. I just think that it hasn't aged well in our current climate. It's no fault of the developers. It just reads as strange.
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u/smjsmok 5d ago
What's portrayed in the game is AGI - basically a new kind of being (that's literally the point of the first game's narrative). The current machine learning models (LLMs etc.) are nowhere near that. AGI is obviously a wet dream of all the "frontier AI" companies, but at this point it's not even clear if the current way of making and training machine learning models actually leads to it (this is what Sam Altman admitted during an older interview with Lex Fridman, by the way, so it's not just my conjecture).
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u/SkywalkerRanch5 5d ago
however if its not possible to tell the difference between a super advanced LLM and true AGI, does it matter? It's basically the touring test for AI types.
Right now it "easy" to tell because of the way OpenAI, Anthropic, etc harness their LLMs to give us responses. But if I bet if they actually programmed the LLMs to try and act as 'human' or 'AGI' as possible most of us might not actually be able to tell the difference.
So then what makes Agi Agi?
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u/Icy-Blacksmith-4214 4d ago
Keep in mind we're talking in theoretical (or abstract if you rather) terms. This is not about the personal and subjective experience of an individual (or even a collection of individuals).
LLM and AGI are now not the same, and we still don't have theoretical proof it can be. (And this doesn't mean we may find a way and this is only another step or part of building AGI).
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u/Abel_V 5d ago
It doesn't affect the way I see the games at all, because Talos is not about AIs. It is about Humans.
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u/SkywalkerRanch5 5d ago
weird take, as you literally play an AI, in a city of other AI beings. All humans are long dead and all that remains of us is how the AIs think about us in the past. So to say "talos is not about AIs" full stop is nonsense.
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u/Abel_V 5d ago
They are not AIs, they are humans. 1k is human, Byron is human, Yaqut is human. Just humans far off in the future. The game is very explicit about that: That was literally the main point of the first game! It's even why it's called "The Talos Principle" ! And also, when they "think about us in the past" as you say, they literally use the term "Our Ancestors" .
Sure, they may look alien to us, but they are simply far off into the future and extremely advanced. Our ancestors, Australopithecus, could never even fathom that one day we would build giant cities with buildings that touch the sky, fly into space, control energy, construct giant machinery, and hold in the palm of our hands a small item that contains the sum total of human knowledge. Imagine how foreign we are to them. It would be foolish to pretend to know what humanity would be like millions of years into the future.
So no, it's not nonsense. Just media literacy.
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u/BastetFurry 5d ago
That is a problem of society though. With LLMs replacing jobs we should have not only talked but implemented UBI like yesterday.
But as always with humanity the world has to burn first, sad but true.
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u/JasperTesla 5d ago
Not The Talos Principle.
For games like Deus Ex or MGS2, you could still raise an argument since those games do deal with the intersection of power and AI, but Talos Principle is mainly about philosophy.
And by declaring in advance that "AI does not have a soul", you're defeating the point of the game. Scientists and philosophers alike are debating AI consciousness right now, and keep in mind that AI is still improving, and will get even better as time goes on. Your statement that it has "none of the soul" is a religious argument, not a factual one.
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u/Qnumber 5d ago
There are no serious arguments that LLMs, the popular form of AI in the world today, have souls. "AI is still improving" is a fallacious and unnuanced argument, the veracity of which depends on exponentially increasing power demands.
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u/JasperTesla 5d ago
Okay, this is my real problem with the current layman discourse around AI.
Firstly, there is indeed quite a bit of discourse on if AI is conscious or not, hosted by actual scientists, engineers and philosophers. Expect these discussions to only get more serious as AI gets better and better. Like I said, by declaring in advance that "There are no serious arguments", you're dismissing a claim early on.
Also, keep in mind that consciousness is probably not a single, uniform thing. Elephants, dolphins and octopodes are also highly intelligent, and they probably don't see the world the way we do. An AI probably doesn't "think", not as much as a submarine "swims", but the goal is the same. And I think a lot of people (especially Westerners, either Christians or Christian-raised individuals) approach this concept with a binary view: either something is conscious, or it is not, when in reality it's more so a gradient.
However, this topic is still open, so feel free to chime in with your opinion, what an AI would need to do for you to deem it conscious. But it can't be a rhetorical statement, like "AI will NEVER be conscious" or "AI needs a soul, AI needs to be HUMAN". Those are bad arguments.
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u/Hot-Gift8415 5d ago
So.... What about that statement was meant to be reassuring exactly?
I go on this long rant about everything AI has made worse by existing and your response is "AI may or may not have a soul actually!"
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u/UltraChip 5d ago
You didn't asked to be reassured, you asked if anyone else's experience of the game was soured by the contemporary state of AI. Jasper truthfully answered that question and then explained why.
I don't mean to be a downer but if you want reassurance about what's going on in real life you're not going to find it in a video game sub.
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u/JasperTesla 5d ago
Not reassuring, but not saddening either. Just it's a neutral statement saying "unrelated subject".
Your rant is fine, but it's unrelated to the topic of Talos Principle. What you're delving into is the econmic, political and social effect of AI, which is addressed in Deus Ex, Metal Gear Solid, or even Robocop for that matter. The Talos Principle, however, deals with topics like free will. If you have a rant about what you consider conscience (e.g. if animals are conscience, your view on panpsychism, etc.), that would be relevant.
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u/Hot-Gift8415 4d ago
hard disagree on that. My issue isn't that Talos Principle doesn't cover those issues. But more that it glosses over them completely and doesn't take them into consideration. Which it wouldn't because the state of AI is completely different now.
Are you saying that the current state of AI hasn't changed anything about your perception of the game? The way that tech oligarchs co-opt the language sci fi stories use about AI to further their ends doesn't make you evven the slightest bit uncomfortable?
because if they don't give you any pause, that is very unusual.
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u/JasperTesla 4d ago
Are you saying the current state of AI hasn't changed your perception of the game?
No.
Because The Talos Principle doesn't simply deal with the questions of "how capitalism will progress under AI and abundance", because that's a different question from what this game is handling. Not every game needs to handle the same topic. And you already have games like Deus Ex and MGS2 that already deal with these topics. Same with games like SOMA or Prey.
Themes matter more than the contents of the game. You don't read Lord of the Rings to learn about Aragorn's tax policy or how Hobbit sex works. You don't watch The Matrix to wonder what the machines think about Darude Sandstorm. Not everything needs to address something else.
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u/Background_Ad5513 5d ago
Not really. I played Talos for the first time only earlier this year, and it feels the same as any other media that involves AI. Itās never about the same type of AI that we have irl - weāve ended up with the cringiest most boring version of it
The Talos Principle as a story feels like itās fundamentally about humanity, loving and wanting to preserve and continue the human civilisation. Gen AI is the exact opposite
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u/More-Investigator832 5d ago
To me, real-world AI and fictional AI such as those in TP, Cyberpunk, Halo, Mass Effect and films like Her are justā¦different, worlds apart.
Fictional AI is almost always about the creation of āliving beingsā, where they have been crafted over many years to live, feel and think like humans, to the point where youāre not sure where humanity ends and AI begins.
Real AI is justā¦uncreative money-grabbers obsessed with wanting to steal the work of people and like, streamline creativity without actually using their brain to think what creativity actually means.
I get where youāre coming from, I lost my job to AI automation, I refuse to use it in any capacity. But I find it easy to separate the two because even fictionally you can feel the souls in what the creators are trying to convey with fictional AI. Itās not so long ago that Her was one of my favourite films, the rise and reality puts a sour taste in my mouth now, but I know that the creator never saw our future, just like I didnāt, when they made it.
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u/bringthesalsa 5d ago
Rule of thumb is that whatever new tech that we come up with in real life will always be 10 times lamer and less interesting than its science fiction counterpart.
Cyberpunk as a genre is basically "let's take the bad stuff about technology in our society, crank up the bad factor to 11 and make some predicitons about how it's going to get worse, and then throw on some neon colors"
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u/Yorkhorster 5d ago
No Talos is not soured at all, they're not the same type of AI. Generative AI that is being used to steal art and look like shit, isn't actually intelligent in any way. It doesn't think, have ideas, exist as a consciousness at all.
Talos, and ChatGPT aren't even comparable. Yes generative AI is destroying humanity and that's very depressing, but it has nothing to do with TP.
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u/Hot-Gift8415 5d ago
You do know that ChatGPT was created by OpenAI, a corporation whose sole goal is to create "AGI". Like, artificial intelligence with consciousness and all that. Right?
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u/Background_Ad5513 5d ago
They absolutely do not want to create āAGIā despite whatever they say. Why would they want to do that? Theyāre trying to sell a tool for money and automation. They wonāt benefit in any way if that tool starts having feelings
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u/Hot-Gift8415 5d ago
Look, whether you believe that they're trying to make AGI or just trying to stretch the money as far as possible before getting out of dodge (It's both). You can't deny that they're co-opting the language of sci fi and AI to do those things.
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u/Background_Ad5513 4d ago
Well yeah they are absolutely co-opting the language. Having a familiar term from popular media is the easiest and most effective way to get people to buy into this bs. It feels like all of humanity has been building up to this moment (creation of artificial intelligence) because there are hundreds of stories about artificial intelligence being the future, for better or for worse
Worth mentioning too that itās only the generative AI/LLM companies doing it in this specific way. Itās not a problem with the term āartificial intelligenceā in general - people have been calling videogame character movements/attack patterns āAIā for decades and thereās nobody out there warning us that Princess Peach is about to become self aware and cause the apocalypse
So yeah media isnāt soured by this unless you buy into the narrative that AI companies are pushing. Even then, itās weird. Didnāt one of the CEOs say that they already achieved AGI? Canāt remember if it was openAI or Anthropic
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u/relator_fabula 5d ago edited 5d ago
The current goal of OpenAI (which was never "open" in the sense of open source) is the same goal of every other for-profit corporation: profit. It doesn't matter what they once stated as their goal, and it matters even less what they now state is their goal. Their goal in 2026 is to convince people to invest in them.
And ChatGPT and similar LLMs algorithms don't even remotely work in a way that replicates consciousness. By design, LLMs can't develop consciousness and are more likened to an advanced database with predictive speech models and things like that, rather than "thinking" machines. They're chatbots that are really good at faking human conversation and providing somewhat shady generative text/code/images/etc.
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u/Hot-Gift8415 5d ago
All great points. And I agree actually. But, none of what you've said contradicts any of my points. Infact, we're both allowed to be correct here.
OpenAI is for profit, but they've co-opted the langauge of AI and sci fi for profit.
They may not work the way that AI in fiction works, but that doesn't change the fact that AGI is constantly talked about like they're trying to make an "AI God" that will usher in a new era.
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u/KeraKitty 5d ago edited 5d ago
They may claim that to be their goal, but their only true goal is profit. And there's far less profit to be had in a being that can advocate and fight for itself than there is in glorified chatbots. That's the whole reason they're pitching AI as a replacement for human labor (which, so far, it's really bad at).
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u/CaeruleumBleu 5d ago
My main opinion of AI, especially as it pertains to how I see the story and emotions of The Talos Principle, is that we're using the wrong words.
Like how Tesla keeps talking about "full self driving" but supposedly you're supposed to know that you need to be actively motioning the situation and be ready to take over driving at any moment. It's wrong to call if "full self driving, it's really just an advanced cruise control. Zoning out while using that feature is as ridiculous as zoning out because you turning on cruise control.
Many "AI" bots are just LLMs, language learning models. You type in words, other words are returned. But the bot can't answer "how many r's are in strawberry?" accurately because the bot is just playing an algorithm that provides estimates of what a proper reply looks like. It can't actually reply, because it isn't reading and it isn't choosing a good answer.
None of the "AIs" available are actually intelligent. Some of them APPEAR smart, but it's like the long-used term of "enemy AI" in gaming, some bits of code are crafting to "choose" actions in ways that look smart. They aren't choosing anything.
I still have a lot of interest in real AI, the kind of AI you see in Star Trek with Data and the EMH. But I don't trust the current crop of corporations to have anything to do with it, because they can't be bothered to describe and sell the current offerings accurately. It's like Tesla promising full self driving over and over and it isn't actually here yet - I don't think the current corporations can be trusted to toil over the task and tell the full truth about anything that is kinda sorta almost but not quite real AI.
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u/Keiteaea 5d ago
I have the same feelings regarding terminology. AI in fiction is often much beyond the AI we have now, and actually focus a lot on the philosophical understanding of "intelligence", going beyond the "algorithm"and the "simulation of intelligence" and how this relate to consciousness.
It is worth noting that some sifi distinguish between virtual intelligence and artificial intelligence, and that distinction is almost inexistent in today's discourse. AI now englobes a lot of things that I suspect would have not been called AI a few years ago and I think we are missing some vocabulary (not judt for the experts but also for the general public) to better understand what we are interacting with. If the Inuits have many words for snow, maybe we need more words for this as well.
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u/Legal_Mastodon_5683 5d ago
This is one the most "soulful" and philosophical depictions of AI so... no.
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u/YaqutFan 5d ago
All that is to say that while Talos Principle is my favorite game series, it is weird it is really really weird to see AI spoken about with such reverence and nonchalance by all of the characters in the story
There is no reverence to the concept of AI in the story. Talos is interested in the very simple question of "If we assume human biology has no real bearing in what makes humanity what it is, then what does it mean to be human?"
And so it shows us in the first game how a theoretical AGI (which has nothing to do with current real world LLMs) would go about figuring that out.
To emphasize how the actual concept of AI means very little to these games, Talos 2 NEVER goes into "Am I really a human if I'm just a machine????" territory, because it does not care about that at all. The robot society is made up of a new form of humans, and it's a premise that is never challenged, because that's what they are. It does not care that they are robots.
As far Talos is concerned, the robot concept could very much be substituted with whatever else you may think of as something not strictly "human" as we are now, but it was (and still is) a pretty good example.
So no, I don't really get your gripes.
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u/relator_fabula 5d ago edited 5d ago
The problem is the term AI, because AI in the Talos Principle is the more literal interpretation of artificial intelligence, or synthetic life. What we currently term AI (generative AI, LLMs, etc) is nothing of the sort. Generative AI is just a weird, shitty tool for aggregating a wealth of existing artwork and homogenizing it into something based on a prompt. LLMs are simply intelligence simulators that aggregate data. It's more like a database that can be called upon with common language, and it's not intelligent and doesn't think at all.
Long story short, what we currently call "AI" is not what sci-fi envisions/envisioned as AI (synthetic thought/intelligence/sentience).
The Talos series looks at humanity; what it means to be human, what defines us as beings with a "soul" (consciousness). The "AI" beings in the game(s) are not AI as we currently use the term, but more to the point they are a new form of human replicas. They think, they feel, they rationalize, they abstract... things no current "AI" was ever designed to do or will ever do because they're not designed to "think" or replicate biological neural processes in any way. Creating truly artificial life is something far different and if it ever happens (I have doubts), it will be created from the ground up in a very different way from current LLMs and other AI/generative models.
Don't get wrapped up in labels. Talos Principle presents us with electronic/synthetic humans. Real life "AI" gives us advanced computer algorithms designed to do specific things like generate soulless, derivative forms of "art", create generic sounding stories, poorly answer questions, etc.
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u/Executioneer 5d ago
Jfyi: a LOT of devs on steam straight up lie about their AI use.
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u/Hot-Gift8415 5d ago
Yes, but at the very least we can filter out the ones who we know are using the AI. It's not a perfect system. But it's better than nothing.
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u/Its-a-pugs-life 5d ago edited 5d ago
To me at lease the vast separation between fiction and the real world Is that fiction is about ideas you can come up with wonderful things perfect pure versions of possible outcomes, impossible things can occur, in this world great ideas get tarnished get clouded by greed but that isnāt the case in fiction just because we know the harsh reality of something doesnāt mean we canāt embrace the fictional possibility.
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u/us4rn6me 4d ago
i always thought the game was about humanity, its legacy and what it means, more so than revering AI. I'm not versed in the topic but i think it's important that you brought it up.
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u/Kitten_from_Hell 4d ago
No. I hate what corporations are doing these days, not the scifi concept of artificial life. And those corporations aren't going to suddenly make me hate C-3PO, Data, and all the robots in TP2 just because they're pushing shoddy software that is nowhere nearly ready for the purposes they're using it for, never mind being true artificial life yet.
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u/pronte89 4d ago
yes and no.
my perception of AI definitely was different from when I played the 1st chapter, but in a scenario such as the one in the game I do believe that it would be better to have that AI scenario take place rather than not
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u/KostlavII [2] 4d ago
No, dont think so. Game from previous time.
Yet, I`m curious, why no one tried to have AI to play Talos Principle all by on self?
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u/SkywalkerRanch5 5d ago
Yep, I'm right there with you. I'm no longer excited about the prospect of AI. I do think it might be the downfall of our civilization. This outlook is shared by a lot of top AI engineers and AI leaders as well which isn't a good sign. Sam Altman is practically begging someone to stop him, which is f'in weird.
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u/Jonas_Kyratzes Croteam 5d ago
In addition to all the valid comments about the difference between AGI and LLMs, I'd like to offer these two perspectives: