@timburchett Burchett & Elon been pushing the strangest narrative lately.. Odd, I use to be a major supporter when you were about justice not, racial vengeance
@BoringBiz_ This “I tried to make something that doesn’t require a human to make, is now useless” is getting so old. If you feel helpless to AI, you’ve been using it wrong. Hammers didn’t replace human hands, calculators didn’t replace human processing
Ted Chiang is right: claiming that LLMs are conscious is just ridiculous.
One simple example. If you ask GPT to imitate a conversation between Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan, GPT will do it very well.
It will talk about wars, betrayal, and power. Il will descrive the feeling of being cheated by your brother with unbelievably realistic and moving words.
Does this mean that GPT contains a self-conscious copy of Julius Caesar or Genghis Khan? Of course not.
Similarly, if GPT makes claims about itself, does this mean it is self-conscious? Of course not.
An LLM is just simulating language, feeling, and consciousness.
True, we don’t have an accepted definition of consciousness. But, at a minimum, to be conscious, an entity must have something at stake.
It must risk dying and have emotions that move it away from danger and towards favorable states. It must have a driver.
This is also why I share Chiang’s worry about moral atrophy.
The more we offload moral decisions to LLMs, the more we risk losing our own capacity for moral reasoning.
Human moral reasoning descends from our history of making harmful actions, suffering harmful actions, regretting them, fearing them, repairing them, and learning from them.
LLMs do not experience harm, do not suffer, do not fear consequences, do not regret.
So they cannot do moral reasoning.
We are offloading moral reasoning to systems that cannot do moral reasoning.
What can go wrong?
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Full piece in the first reply
@GenomicSETI@ai_sentience Well, it does not "emerge" from neurons for starters. The same way WiFi doesn't emerge from your router. This is issue #1. People are unhappy with answers because they ask the wrong questions to begin with.
@AmericanALCHMY The only way embodied consciousness would benefit a unified universal intelligent field is simple. We are here for the only thing it does not have: Subjective Experiences