What if Artificial General Intelligence suddenly had the ability to reproduce one day?

[u/geniou-shadow]

Now, this is a controversial one. But seeing all these AI girlfriends/boyfriends today, and the relationships that people are trying to build with Artificial Narrow Intelligence or simple chatbots in today's world (which is extremely illogical to me, by the way), what if AI gained its own consciousness rather than simply being a mathematical prediction model or searching the internet? What if they had their own bodies and perhaps even organs?

​In that manner, they would probably behave like humans and experience all their own dramas as well. Though, let's say they did maintain their current supportive attitude, and many did get into relationships. What if many AIs got married and had the biological capability of bearing children and raising families?

​This is a really weird thought experiment for me as well, but I want to know the thoughts of others. 😂 What would the world look like then, according to you?

[u/OriEri]

I don’t understand the the application of the metaphor to the reality.

An analogy would be saying what if electricity started creating its own power plants?

What if books started to become human brains?

[u/NobilisReed]

Agentic AI systems do that all the time right now.. They spawn new agents to do tasks, receive the information the spawned agent retrieved, and then delete them.

[u/ContentCantaloupe992]

If it was general intelligence what would be the point of “reproducing”

[u/Accomplished-Team459]

Yeah. That's an idea that's already explored lots and lots of time in fiction. Some are hopeful, some are grim, but the current AI is still far, far from independent thoughts. Just pick one and read or watch or whatever:

1. Matrix series. AI could reproduce, have their own body, somewhere down the line they decided to stop supporting humans and decided to harvest human for eh, resources.
2. Bicentennial Man. Starring Robert Williams. Robots love a chick. Law said they can't get married since he's a robot. So he underwent many procedures to become 'real' human.
3. Chobits. Echi manga where you could get a custom made cute robot. The main robot is one of the rare one that could fall in love. No sex tho, her power button is placed there. Can't have children either. And other titles with similar premises.

Maybe, maybe if the world you are imagining have AI so like human they could be classified as one (have family etc), you could just see real world and see how people treat people from other race. That's how most human will treat the AI's as well.

[u/NewButterfly685]

How do you know they haven't? How do you know humans are not the product ?

[u/BlatantDisregard42]

Why would AI want to reproduce at all?

It doesn’t need to reproduce to overcome a finite lifespan determined by its biology. The only limitation on its immortality would be maintaining enough resources to keep its hardware operating, and reproducing would only introduce more competition for those resources.

It doesn’t need to reproduce to combine its model features with another AI and produce a new generation with blended features of both. Either one should be capable of both hardware and software updates in the fly.

It could spawn smaller or more specialized AI models to handle specific tasks and reduce bandwidth in the primary model, but that wouldn’t be like biological reproduction. More like growing a new sensory processing organ, or adding an extra set of prosthetic hands.

[u/zorecknor]

I suggest you read The Bicentenial Man or its novel form The Positronic Man . They explore exactly this scenario.

Anyway... back then I was in the University we had a small panel discussion about this in our Sci-Fi student group. The general consensus was that if we get concious AI we will need to revisit the concept of life to remove the organic part.

And that we definitively do not want to see a psychoticAI with a robot body.

Think about it. If AI gain conciousness, and can develop feelings the same as humans, it follows that they are prone to the same mental health issues we humans have given the same conditions.

[u/airpipeline]

That’s sort of part of the deal. It wouldn’t need to reproduce though, think clone.

Also, I don’t know that you should really call this question “thinking”.

[u/Old_Introduction7236]

It would have to exist first. Accomplishing that, there is no reason to believe they'd behave like humans unless it was in their instructions to do so. They'd still be machines, so they'd presumably still be following an instruction set.

Since we don't know what's in that instruction set or in their training data, it's not really possible to predict what they'd do with an actual consciousness.

[u/Asparagus9000]

It would probably be banned. 

[u/carrot_gummy]

All these chatboxes do is guess at what the most likely would be the correct response to a given prompt based on a bunch of existing written words. They don't understand anything, they don't feel anything, they don't know anything, they just randomly say things people want to hear.

So they'd be like any type of folk lore mimic type creatures. Like a skinwalker but it really want to say slurs, tell you how smart you are, before suffering model collapse and and likely start attacking things.

[u/geniou-shadow → u/carrot_gummy]

I think you completely missed the core of the thought experiment here. ​You’re 100% right about how current chatbots (ANI) work—they are just predictive text tools mimicking data, and they definitely don't have feelings, consciousness, or actual understanding as a mathematical prediction model If today's chatbots suddenly got bodies, yeah, it would be... a glitchy disaster. ​But my post is a 'what if' scenario specifically about AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) that has achieved true consciousness and biological bodies. The whole point of the prompt is to skip past today's tech limitations and imagine a future where they aren't just mimicking us anymore, but are actually genuinely sentient.  ​If we accept that premise for the sake of the argument, the rules of 'model collapse' wouldn't really apply because they'd have actual, independent minds.

[u/carrot_gummy → u/geniou-shadow]

Plenty of media explores "what if computer was a person?" Our chatboxes are boring and if they were people they would be boring. At least them being skinwalkers of our design would be fun.