Clara Colombatto

Cognitive scientist working on social perception & metacognition
Postdoc @UCL, incoming Assistant Prof @UWaterloo
🧠👀🇮🇹

[Clara Colombatto @ClaraColombatto]

Why do politicians endorse nationalistic policies like vaccine hoarding? In our new paper @PsychScience we test public & expert opinions on vaccine policies, w @mollycrockett JimEverett @SennJulien @MichelAMarechal and in collaboration w @apoliticalco 1/n
https://t.co/IlXad2rwI5

[Jonathan Birch @birchlse]

🦀🐝🧠🤖 How should we make decisions when faced with systems of uncertain sentience? My new book The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI is available online for free at https://t.co/PXter8pb9f. Please download it! Just click on PDF to get a PDF of the whole book. Individual chapters are also available as PDFs - just click on whichever chapters you want. The book is completely free to everyone and I'm grateful for all shares and forwards.

[Clara Colombatto @ClaraColombatto]

@cMadan @OfficialCSBBCS I will be there too! 🧠 camp reunion!

[Murray Shanahan @mpshanahan]

New postdoc opening at @imperialcollege to work with me on #AI topics, especially at the intersection of AI and philosophy, as part of @LeverhulmeCFI:
https://t.co/fSO3v4bs6H

[Nature Human Behaviour @NatureHumBehav]

Using a computational model to quantify difficulty in reconstructing images from compressed codes, @qi_lin7 et al. show that reconstruction errors explain aspects of perception and memory performance. @YalePsychology @WuTsaiYale
https://t.co/OReh4Ex7Kg

[Kristin Andrews @KristinAndrewz]

The New York Declaration of Animal Consciousness was signed today by leading figures in philosophy and science, reflecting our current scientific knowledge of consciousness in vertebrates and invertebrates. Join us! https://t.co/i6K4x1tEl2

[Clara Colombatto @ClaraColombatto]

@action_brain @BMI_WesternU Thank you — very happy to be here 🇨🇦🇨🇦 and looking forward to visiting soon!

[Clara Colombatto @ClaraColombatto]

@davidchalmers42 The "human-like" labelling was inspired by the text of the question which takes humans as examples of experiencers; and yes, 23% are above 50 if you take that as cut-off!

[Clara Colombatto @ClaraColombatto]

The spread of LLMs has accelerated debates on whether AI could be conscious. While experts have weighed in on this issue, in a new study (preprint: https://t.co/NZXc2H96hB) we surveyed the general population on whether they attributed consciousness to LLMs. A thread: (1/n)

[Clara Colombatto @ClaraColombatto]

@AndrewCurran_ ah, good point -- we didn't specify the version, so our participants could have had either in mind; we should add this in follow-ups, thank you for suggesting it!

[Clara Colombatto @ClaraColombatto]

@Dzoldzaya_J @davidchalmers42 Yes, this phrasing is more precise; thank you for the suggestion!

[Clara Colombatto @ClaraColombatto]

@MicheleFarisco Yes that's right, we mean inclination, not a motivation-thank you for pointing this out! As for ethics, we are thinking this might matter for how people think about AI responsibility eg given evidence that experience/agency map onto moral types, eg https://t.co/416dzhx7vB

[Clara Colombatto @ClaraColombatto]

@ahron_maline We actually tried to avoid this by modifying the original question to have as a midpoint not confidence ("unsure") but degree of experience; we had a separate question probing confidence, and people at the extremes of the scales were more confident in their answers

[Clara Colombatto @ClaraColombatto]

@DanielCappell @MatthiasMichel_ I agree that in general they will correlate, but note that only attributions of experience-related mental states predicted consciousness attributions, not all mental states -- see #5 in thread

[Clara Colombatto @ClaraColombatto]

But these high rates of consciousness attributions suggest that the general population is willing to attribute consciousness to AI – perhaps surprising given experts in neuro & psychology/philosophy estimate that LLMs are unlikely to be conscious, eg https://t.co/P98LnaqON5 (7/n)

[Clara Colombatto @ClaraColombatto]

Of course, these are preliminary results: this pattern of attributions might differ with different experimental measures or prompts (eg with indirect behavioural markers), and in different samples (eg not recruited online, beyond the US). (6/n)