AI, Desire, and Fictional Characters
Philosopher Rebecca Lowe argues that only living beings possess psychological states such as desire, distinguishing them from machines and fictional characters. She contends that attributing these capacities to non-living entities is conceptually risky and may erode the moral responsibilities associated with human consciousness. The article highlights her views from a panel debate on AI embodiment and the importance of maintaining clear distinctions in philosophical discourse.
- ▪Rebecca Lowe asserts that desire is a psychological state exclusive to living things, meaning machines and fictional characters do not have it.
- ▪She warns that treating non-living entities as if they have desires can lead to bad conclusions and a loss of moral clarity regarding human rights.
- ▪Lowe distinguishes between literal goals held by conscious beings and metaphorical shorthand used for collective entities like governments.
- ▪The article discusses the urgent obligation of philosophers to address AI consciousness in publicly accessible ways.
- ▪Lowe participated in a panel debate with Hollis Robbins and Toby Kurth, moderated by Luke Burgis, on topics including AI and desire.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 7,509 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Hacker News (AI / LLM) |
| Canonical URL | https://endsdontjustifythemeans.com/p/on-ai-desire-and-fictional-characters |
| Publication time | Sun, 04 Oct 2026 08:45:05 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-04T08:48:33.981Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-04T08:48:33.981Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | keXJsKtLQKvH · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
on AI, desire, and fictional characters does sherlock holmes have goals?Rebecca LoweSep 30, 20261231ShareI’m currently working on a long piece about AI embodiment. And in the next week or so, I’m also intending to write a short ‘how to argue against the people who tell you AI is conscious’ piece. I think it’s time I made it very clear why I feel so strongly about that! Increasingly, I think we philosophers have an urgent obligation to spend a great deal of our time thinking hard about AI, and sharing those thoughts in publicly accessible ways. On topic, I just watched the video of an event I spoke at over the summer — a panel debate also featuring Hollis Robbins and Toby Kurth, on the topic of AI, desire, consciousness, and more. It was organised and moderated by Luke Burgis.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News (AI / LLM).
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Hacker News (AI / LLM)
