Text like “33°C” is not touch, argues a critique of LLM embodiment claims

flowersslop · x · 2026-07-28

The post argues that feeding an LLM the text token “33°C” is not remotely equivalent to human touch, warmth, or intimacy.

It draws a sharp line between text-only inputs and a genuinely embodied or omnimodal architecture, where temperature, pressure, texture, proprioception, and touch would be integrated into the model’s latent dynamics as native modalities. Only in that setting, the author says, could we even begin to ask whether a machine analogue of embodied experience might emerge.

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