When You Talk to ChatGPT, Is Anyone There? (dobyte2026)

When you talk to ChatGPT, is anyone there? Almost certainly not, LLMs don't have inner experience, genuine understanding, or a mind behind the words. But this immediately raises a much older and more unsettling question: how do you ever know there's a mind behind anyone's words? This talk takes a question everyone is asking about AI — is there anyone home inside ChatGPT? — and uses it to crack open one of philosophy's oldest unsolved problems: the problem of other minds. The answer to the AI question is almost certainly no. LLMs process form without grounding it in the world; they don't understand in any meaningful sense. But once you accept that, you realise the same uncertainty applies to every human you've ever spoken to. You have never been able to verify that another person is genuinely conscious rather than a very sophisticated system producing the right outputs. You just assumed. The talk draws on philosophy of mind — from Descartes to Chalmers — to explore why we're wired to project minds onto things that don't have them, what the 1966 ELIZA effect already revealed about this, and what it means for how we should think about, build, and interact with AI systems. For this talk no philosophy background required. Aimed at anyone who builds, uses, or thinks critically about AI. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ about this event: https://fahrplan.do-byte.de/do-byte-2026/talk/CZQQJP/