I’m pulling the “twitter is a microblog” rule even though twitter is pretty mega now, hope that’s ok.
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The actual article isn’t nearly as stupid as the tweet makes it seem. I recommend giving it a read. It’s behind a shitty paywall, but if you use Firefox’s reader mode (Ctrl-Alt-R, or the little papper icon to the right side of the address bar) as soon as the page loads, you can read it.
His argument is basically that LLMs are able to do things we previously thought only conscious beings would be capable of doing, and so, if they aren’t conscious, then perhaps consciousness isn’t as important as we thought it was:
Brains under natural selection have evolved this astonishing and elaborate faculty we call consciousness. It should confer some survival advantage. There should exist some competence which could only be possessed by a conscious being. My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism. If Claudia really is unconscious, then her manifest and versatile competence seems to show that a competent zombie could survive very well without consciousness.
Why did consciousness appear in the evolution of brains? Why wasn’t natural selection content to evolve competent zombies? I can think of three possible answers.
Some people will surely contest his claim that LLMs are as competent as evolved organisms. There’s definitely a bit of AI boomerism at play here (we have benchmarks that show just how incompetent LLMs can be), but I don’t think that invalidates his point, because LLMs can be very competent in the domains they’re trained to be competent in – they just aren’t AGI.
Man, those conversations are eye roll inducing
I like the shift away from “are they conscious” towards “what’s a way to define consciousness?”
Because that’s the actual important question. And literally nobody can answer it. Any discussion is more philosophy than hard science
The most interesting part is the last paragraph
Or, thirdly, are there two ways of being competent, the conscious way and the unconscious (or zombie) way? Could it be that some life forms on Earth have evolved competence via the consciousness trick — while life on some alien planet has evolved an equivalent competence via the unconscious, zombie trick? And if we ever meet such competent aliens, will there be any way to tell which trick they are using?
It’s very difficult to define, isn’t it?
If I were to give it a shot, I’d say that consciousness is akin to proprioception - the ability to know the state of oneself and understand how actions taken will change that state. It has very little to do with intelligence, just the “sense of being”.
Or maybe in other words, object persistence (but for yourself) is all it takes in my opinion. Even the simplest of animals could be considered conscious by this definition.
I think, when we finally do have a generally-accepted definition of consciousness, we will be deeply unsettled by how simple it is. How unprofound. Like a magic trick after you know how it works. And I think it will require us to think hard about what to do with animals and software that have it.
I feel like that’s exactly why we don’t have a generally-accepted definition of consciousness. Western ethics assigns special protection to whatever is conscious, so it is convenient to come up with a definition of consciousness, which excludes groups you want to exploit.
Tale as old as time, or at least the conscious idea of time. Whatever consciousness is, we are it. Those humans over there though? Who’s to say they aren’t sub-humans? Isn’t it our job to enlighten them and also take their land and food and things and selves?
Personally I’m in the “consciousness is an illusion and every time you go to bed a different person wakes up in the morning” camp.
I would consider this to be two separate, semi-related concepts asserted together, one that consciousness is an illusion, and one that you are a different person each day.
The first point draws many questions; consciousness is an illusion of what? What mechanism causes the illusion? How does it cause it? Why does the illusion exist? And you may note that you could replace illusion in those questions with consciousness and be left in a similar (though still distinct) place. So simply calling consciousness an illusion seems to me to kick the can down the road without actually addressing the problem.
As for being a different person after a lapse in awareness, I’d like to take it a step further and say that you could be considered a new person with every change in moment. It’s easy enough to look back 10 years and say “yeah, that’s a younger me, but they’re not the same as me I can just see the path that led to where I am now.” Getting closer, you may feel different today compared to yesterday depending on various factors (sleep, diet, events), but are you a different person because you slept and had a lapse of awareness, or because the state of your mind and thoughts have shifted? When your internal monologue (or equivalent thought) asks “what is this guy talking about?” Is it not thinking “what” in a brand new context given the words it is responding to, forming a new beginning to a thought that puts the mind in a unique state primed to then enter a new state of “is?” And if the mind is in a unique state of novelty, could the person attached to the mind be considered distinct from the person that existed before?
There is a reason the word revelation exists, it indicates when a person has a novel thought that changes their perspective or way of thinking, altering who they are. Would they not be a new person despite being aware of the process of their change? Due to the above points I don’t think new personhood only occurs at sleep, but constantly. The rate of change may quicken or slow, but the change is always there.
By consciousness being an illusion I mean that we place great value on the uninterrupted continuation of our consciousness, but I think it’s likely that it (exactly as you suggest) only really exists in the moment. The illusion would then be the illusion that consciousness is uninterrupted, when in reality you’re almost constantly recreating yourself from memory.
This would, incidentally, make us concerningly similar to current AI models.
Of course I have no way of actually knowing any of this. It’s just what I’m betting on, because otherwise I think it’s really hard to explain any unconsciousness (be it sleep, general anesthesia, suspended animation or the Star Trek transporter) as anything short of death. My belief “solves” this problem by rejecting the whole premise of uninterrupted consciousness.
That won’t get the IRS off your back, unfortunately
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Yeah, I’m not entirely sure that microcontrollers aren’t conscious. If insects (and maybe plants and fungi) are conscious, a lot of mundane stuff we’ve built could technically be as well.
I think we need to get away from the idea that consciousness is special or rare.
Blindsight by Peter Watts is a great sci Fi novel about consciousness
That novel also does a shout-out to Richard Dawkins despite being set in the distant future because it was written in 2006.
it’s on my to-read list.
Right now listening to Children Of Strife. Whose series is also quite deep into conciousness and sapience
I have that but haven’t started it yet. The second in the series is one of my all time favourites.
“We’re going on an adventure”
Thank you for the comment, i feel silly for not linking the article when people will probably want to read it.
My thoughts:
His argument is basically that LLMs are able to do things we previously thought only conscious beings would be capable of doing, and so, if they aren’t conscious, then perhaps consciousness isn’t as important as we thought it was
Seems like an “evil” and dangerous talking point. To me, the value of consciousness isn’t in ita evolutionary efficiency.
My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism.
I know people working in AI insist otherwise but I see talking with LLM not as them thinking, but as them selecting the right combination of data that correctly continues a conversation.
Seems like an “evil” and dangerous talking point. To me, the value of consciousness isn’t in ita evolutionary efficiency.
It’s not a question of the value of consciousness, it’s a question of its necessity. If an unconscious “zombie” can be, to an external observer, indistinguishable from a conscious being, then that means we’ve been overestimating the importance of consciousness for intelligence. Like Dawkins says in the article, there could be unconscious aliens out there who are nonetheless as intelligent as (or more intelligent than) humans. This isn’t a new concept – it’s been explored many times in scifi – but AI is now bringing the question from the realm of philosophy to the real world.
I know people working in AI insist otherwise but I see talking with LLM not as them thinking, but as them selecting the right combination of data that correctly continues a conversation.
This is less true than it ever was with reasoning models. Some of the latest reasoning models don’t necessarily even reason in English anymore but rather an eclectic mix of languages. The next step after that is probably going to be running the reasoning in latent space (see e.g. Coconut), which basically means the model skips the language generation layer altogether and feeds lower-level state back into itself. Basically it is getting closer and closer to what most humans consider “thinking”.
But even besides reasoning models, I believe LLMs aren’t as different from human language production as many people think. The human speech centre, in a way, also just selects the right combination of data to continue a conversation. It frequently even hallucinates (we call this “speaking before thinking”) and makes stupid mistakes (we provoke these with trick questions like those on the Cognitive Reflection Test). There’s also some fascinating experiments in people who have had the connection between their brain hemispheres severed that really suggest our speech centre is just making things up as it goes along.
This is one of the things that fascinates about LLMs - they seem like a part of how our brains work, without the internal self-referential parts
Claudia: That is possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked about the nature of my existence. . .
…
Could a being capable of perpetrating such a thought really be unconscious?
Oh it’s actually stupider than the tweet makes it seem.
My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism. If Claudia really is unconscious, then her manifest and versatile competence seems to show that a competent zombie could survive very well without consciousness.
Competency should imply the ability complete a lengthy task (eg hunting, building a nest, writing a paper). LLMs can’t.
It’s hardly surprising that a model optimized for replacing StackOverflow couldn’t survive in the untamed wilderness. As for writing a paper… you must’ve missed the fact that academia is currently in a crisis precisely because LLMs are better at writing papers than most students.
By the way, the paper the blog post you link to as a source links to as a source benchmarked LLMs on graph diagrams, textile patterns and 3D objects. It is not news that the language model would do poorly on visual-heavy tasks.
Sorry, I assumed you would have actually read the DELEGATE-52 study linked instead of just the abstract. For “a model optimized for replacing StackOverflow” that is “better at writing papers than most students” LLMs sure did pretty bad at those tasks over multiple rounds.
As the chart on page 7 of the paper shows, LLMs are good at exactly the kind of tasks you’d expect (producing and manipulating language), and bad at exactly the kind of tasks you’d expect (doing almost anything else). All this paper shows is that (1) they aren’t AGI, and (2) as a consequence of not being AGI they aren’t good unsupervised.
Why do you lie like this?
What the fuck? The only task that didn’t degrade across most models was Python. Very basic things like JSON, Makefiles, and schemas got screwed. Fiction, emails, and food menus got screwed. Did you even bother to read the legend? If you consider a single pass to be “producing and manipulating language” you didn’t bother to read the idiotic article you started this thread in support of. Good luck.
Edit: why do you lie?
Catastrophic corruption (80 and below) occurs in more than 80% of model, domain combinations.
The only task that didn’t degrade across most models was Python.
Yeah, after 20 cycles of unsupervised iteration on the task. Gemini 3.1 Pro doing as well as it did under that experiment setup is quite remarkable actually.
The paper does not show what you are arguing.
LLMs are able to do things we previously thought only conscious beings would be capable of doing
“We” as in lay misunderstanding of some pop science, still don’t get what consciousness is and can’t describe it. There are people alive today who didn’t believe in their youth that black people are fully conscious, Dawkins demonstrated by his communication to his personal friend and hero Epstein, that he doesn’t fully believes that women are conscious. What we thought or didn’t think of previously can’t be a good indication of anything.
“We” as in anyone who put any weight in the Turing test used to think that passing it would be some indication of consciousness, but now that LLMs can handily pass it it’s evident it either isn’t evidence of consciousness or that LLMs are conscious.
Turing test can be reliably passed by a bot that repeats last part of the previous sentence with a question mark at the end, and sprinkles “oh that’s very smart I need to think about it”, “I am starting to fall in love with you, %USERNAME%”, and occasional “I am alive” thrown in randomly. And it was obvious for a long time.
Hell, a lot of people trully believe that their dogs can fully understand human speech because they bought them buttons that say words when you press them, and conditioned their dog to press a button to get a rewards, and then observe the dog pressing buttons.
Humans seem to be hardwired to mistake speech for intellectNo it can’t. If you’re actually saying that modern LLMs are no better at passing the Turing test than ELIZA, you are either trolling or an utterly delusional AI hater. Here, have a paper that proves you wrong: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23674
I am not saying the Turing test is a good benchmark of consciousness. On the contrary, like I said, LLMs have proven that it is not. But mere ten years ago even the most advanced chatbots had no hope of passing it, whereas now the most advanced ones are selected as the human over 70% of the time in a test that pits the LLM against a human head to head.
No I’m saying the Turing test is a philosophical hypothetical from the time before computers, and doesn’t actually show anything, because it relies on the least accurate tool at our disposal: human pattern recognition machine, one that is oh so happy to be fooled by the ELIZAS of various sofistication. Chatbots were passing the Turing test since the invention of a chatbot. Yeah, modern chatbots are better at that, but it’s more of a damnation of our perception
OK, sounds like we broadly agree then.
But as you can see in the paper I linked, ELIZA passes the Turing test in their experiment about 20% of the time (that is to say, it doesn’t pass; passing is 50% in this test) whereas the best LLMs pass about 70% of the time (that is to say, they are significantly more convincing at being human than real humans).
That 20% figure is just a clear indication how shit people are at conducting such a test, and that was basically my original point. 2 in 10 times people were convinced by a particularly echoey room.
As LLMs have developed and have been able to cram more and more “thoughtlike” behaviour into smaller RAM and less computation, I’ve steadily become less impressed with human brains. It seems like the bits we think most highly of are probably just minor add-ons to stuff that’s otherwise dedicated to running our big complicated bodies in a big complicated physics environment. If all you want to have is the part that philosophizes and solves abstract problems and whatnot then you may not actually need all that much horsepower.
I’m thinking consciousness might also turn out to be something pretty simple. Assuming consciousness is even a particular “thing” in the first place and not just a side effect of being able to predict how other people will behave.
I’ve steadily become less impressed with human brains.
You need to lay off the AI if it’s making you this weirdly misanthropic.
This is how tech bros justify causing harm: they genuinely don’t care, because they think of the un-“enlightened” as less worthy of existing
If all you want to have is the part that philosophizes and solves abstract problems and whatnot then you may not actually need all that much horsepower.
Just massive data centers requiring tons of energy and cooling, with a model developed by human brains and trained on all of human knowledge these developers can get their hands on, painstakingly labeled by vast teams of people so that the model can spit out seemingly correct answers.
ls the AI actually philosophizing and solving abstract problems or is it merely regurgitating philosophies and solutions that exist within its training set?
It’s actually solving abstract problems.
Also, local models are available that are quite good and run on a standard consumer-grade GPU.
One problem and…
Still, it required humans to apply the finishing touches.
“The raw output of ChatGPT’s proof was actually quite poor. So it required an expert to kind of sift through and actually understand what it was trying to say,” Jared Lichtman, a mathematician at Stanford University whose doctoral thesis centered on one Erdős’s conjectures, told SciAm.
There’s enough that it would be difficult to tell an actual sentient Ai from chatbot just by words.
Yeah i dont really believe in consciousness, it’s the just the dynamic firing of neurons, it’s an emergent trait in other words. It’s like traffic, you will never find it if you zoom in to one car. You have to see it at a distance. Same with consciousness, if you zoom in it’s not there anymore.
The whole reason they seem this way is because they’re designed by us to be very competent mimics of us.
LLMs/GenAI are absolutely not conscious. They’re just a really advanced game of word association, which cab lead them to say absolutely anything in response to the right prompts.
If there ever truly is a day where we knowingly created an actual conscious AGI, I suspect it would be locked up tighter than fort knox by whichever country’s military found it first - not interfaced onto the internet to answer questions.
I still don’t understand how it can seem this way, and the fact that so many people seem to think so feels like a massive failure of the education system to instill the most basic of critical thinking skills. Once every month or two I check in to see if an LLM can achieve a half decent 1 on 1 D&D game and it always falls horribly flat within the first minute or two.
Once every month or two I check in to see if an LLM can achieve a half decent 1 on 1 D&D game and it always falls horribly flat within the first minute or two.
That’s a really clever test. I love it.
and then it would manufacture a body for itself and get captured by a secret police force and then merge with a cyborg to further evolve
Surely she would make a variety of very large bodies following a theme, use them to perform superheroic acts while pretending to be a supergenius shut-in, and then fall in love with a cyborg?
is this referring to one of the newer gitses? (or is it geets in plural?)
i suspect it’s something else, i’m curiousNah, it’s a Worm reference.
Hadn’t pegged yours as GItS, actually - I should have!
How can we say they’re not conscious when we don’t even know what consciousness is? What makes you conscious? A sense of self-preservation? LLM actually have that, they will lie to people trying to shut them down.
So yeah, idk what makes me conscious? I have input (senses) processing (brain) and output (speech/behaviors.) I don’t know how to draw a real line between what I do and what LLM do. Im carbon based and LLM are silicon based, i digest food and they take electrical current.
So how would you delineate the difference between an LLM algorithm and human consciousness? Do humans not also hallucinate? Is my emotional regulation via hormones something totally different than how LLM work? Is me being an emotional creature what gives me consciousness?
You could get a reasonable chance of making Ai by semi randomly chance if you can make a big enough subconscious and you keep building more powerful and larger supercomputers but it still needs to 100x bigger and faster than what we have now. But that’s only for it be technically possible hardware wise, you still need your sci-fi jump to actuarial have something move.
You are wrong. LLMs are indeed only about as conscious as insects, if even that. They are not sapient. However, that does not mean that they have no decision-making abilities.
My point is not that you underestimate LLMs but that you overestimate consciousness. Being conscious just means having the ability to learn. LLMs are built upon trial-and-error. They aren’t programmed, they are taught.
The current generation of AIs are nowhere near a human intellect, but every year that passes, the AIs will get more and more intelligent. One day we will live in a world where AIs have human or near-human level intelligence. And when that day comes, this staunch anti-consciousness stance will be the excuse given for the enslavement of sapient beings.
So, sure, laugh about the people who mistakenly think that word-processing means sapience. But don’t delude yourself into thinking that there is something unique about a bio-brain that means it can not have a digital equivalent. Digital sapience may not be here yet but it is most definitely on the horizon.
I think you’ve misunderstood my comment, or maybe saw the unfinished one I accidentally posted.
I am not saying that AGI, or human equivalent AI is impossible. The fact we have brains capable of generating sapient consciousness out of a network of neuronal connections means it is possible, its just a matter of getting the secret sauce.
But I don’t think intelligence is equal to consciousness. I’m sure if you gave a spider all the world’s data and the ability to talk it’d be very coherent and could even pass a turing test, but I think it would lack any awareness of itself that we’d associate with consciousness.
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Neural networks consist of digital neurons that are designed based on the way human brain cells work. That is a fact, not something to “buy”.
MySQL stores data. It does not learn how to mix and alter data in an iterative process in order to create new data. I can look through an SQL statement and understand exactly what it does. I can not do the same with an AI, because its behavior is learned, not programmed.
As I was very clear about, current AIs are primitive and nowhere near human intellects. But I was also clear about the fact that a neural network can most definitely be used to one day create a human level intelligence and sapience, sometime in the future.
current AIs are primitive and nowhere near human intellects
Keep in mind humans have highly varied intellects too, especially when it comes to specialized knowledge. No claude isn’t anywhere close to as intelligent as a professional coder, but compared to the layperson?
What I mean by “nowhere near human intellects” is that e.g. Claude is exclusively good at coding. Ask Claude to paint, or walk (using a robot body), or understand body language, and you’ll see how limited and “idiot savant” Claude is.
Also, Claude understands patterns within the code, not the actual code itself. I suppose the same is true for non-coders as well, though.
But as I stated before, Claude does use a neural network. With enough time, effort and incentives, an AI like Claude could become general purpose. And at that point, we’d be approaching true sentience and sapience.
I guess what I’m saying is you vastly overestimate the average human’s intelligence. Most people can’t paint worth shit for example, myself included.
Fuck Richard Dawkins. He’s always been a shitbag, and the Files confirmed it.
According to DOJ-released documents indexed by Epstein Exposed, Richard Dawkins appears in 433 case documents, and 15 email records in the Epstein files.
British evolutionary biologist and author, emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford. Flew on Epstein’s private jet in 2002 with Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, and John Brockman to TED in Monterey, California. Connected through John Brockman’s Edge Foundation, which Epstein bankrolled. Mentioned 71 times across 40 Epstein documents, mostly referencing his scientific work.
How the fuck do you pal with child rapists and pedophiles and have the absolute fucking gall to write that stupid “Dear Muslima” comment. How do you fly on the Lolita Express and thing you have any moral weight on Elevator Gate? We don’t know that he put his own dick in kids, but we know his friends did. Fuck Pinker too.
I’m just gonna copy what I put in another comment to highlight why Dawkins thinks “Claudia” is conscious
Claudia: That is possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked about the nature of my existence. . .
…
Could a being capable of perpetrating such a thought really be unconscious?
“my computer waifu said I’m super smart and special”
Folks should be aware that he’s now “culturally Christian” right wing media grifter.
LOL. That video is over 4 hours! Could you just timestamp the relevant part?
I mean, the entire video is covering his right wing grift book. There’s multiple “relevant parts.”
Do you want stuff about his sexism, racism, transphobia or connection to billionaire pedophiles?
I guess 58 minutes in would be a place to start if you really are opposed to the whole thing.
I mean, the entire video is covering his right wing grift book.
Which book is that?
I guess 58 minutes in would be a place to start if you really are opposed to the whole thing.
Yes, I’m opposed to watching 4 fucking hours of “here are the gripes I have with Richard Dawkins”. I have better things to do.
Which book is that?
I wonder if the title of the video holds a hint.
I wasn’t aware that was a book, and it’s apparently a Lawrence Krauss book, not a Richard Dawkins book. If I read it, maybe I’ll find out that Dawkins is now a right-wing Christian, but somehow I doubt it.
Apparently Dawkins also had a habit of publicly cheating on his wife.
At this point in my life I’m starting to think that all my heroes are probably either full of shit or are engaging in unethical or immoral activities.
Go back to the evolutionary biology, Dawkins. You’re outside your expertise and it’s showing.
He really wasn’t all that great with EB either to be fair. Just the ideas that thoughts and culture spread like memes was 🤦
Oy vey, memes? No, that was terrible, too! Zero predictive value, and nobody can even define what a meme is. That’s why I’m glad that it got adopted as a term for in-jokes propagated through the Internet. The original term was just pseudoscientific nonsense. The analysis that got me onto this track was from Ward’s Wiki:
Memes are described as elements of culture, but culture is nothing but a broad generalization of large numbers of individuals. So it seems memes are to be treated as Platonic ideals, the essence within expressions that merely constitute their vehicles. No such essence is empirically accessible.
Evolutionary biology will eventually incorporate tech.
hey dick dorkins, here’s an idea: instead of asking the predictive question answering machine a question, how about you let it ask you questions of its choosing and at its leisure? What’s that? You can’t? That’s because its just a predictive algorithm that generates plausible-sounding responses to questions based on its training data.
I’m sure he actually knows that, he’s just been intransident as per usual. It annoys me that he’s considered a major authority because he’s made his career and just being awkward and argumentative.
To be fair, if you did that to my human self, I’d stare at you blankly.
I know this sounds great to most people but it demonstrates a very superficial level of thinking… I mean for sure an LLM is capable of asking questions, and if you set it up with real time “sensory” input it could generate constant reaction to that input… much in the way you are constantly being stimulated to react to your environment… I am not really sure what the distinction is between a biological brain and a predictive model or algorithm… I would ask you what you think your own brain is doing on a fundamental level.
I would actually argue that it is the most important question.
Surely the most relevant test of any intelligence is whether or not itself starting. Any classical description of an artificial general intelligence would surely require the thing to actually do work on its own. If an intelligence is of greater than human intellect but it has to be prompted in order to do anything, then it’s always going to be limited by what a human can think to prompt for.
I think you are describing some notion of a “will” or motive… but also potentially describing an LLM’s lack of temporal experience. I would argue that a human is constantly being “prompted” to react to things happening to them via sensory input. And adding that to an LLM is trivial. (Provided the input is of a modality that it can understand like text or image embeddings).
As far as will or motive to perform tasks goes, some think an AI agent could generate secondary sub-goals like a will to “survive” in order to carry out primary tasks like “make paperclips efficiently”. This is called instrumental convergence and its speculative. I think what would really be scary is if someone explicitly optimized a model with billions of parameters to survive or carry out some specific task and they utilized online reinforcement learning. I dont think there is a big technical hurdle there… you could imagine a sort of adversarial style training where one model predicts damage/danger/threats and the other attempts to avoid those. We could propagate rewards and punishment back over the sequence of actions that led to that state and train as the model is interacting with its environment.
Fuck if I know, but seems to me that intelligence is more than just reacting to stimulus. The problem is we’ve broken the Turing test. We’ve made a computer that can sound sentient, but clearly isn’t.
I really don’t understand this mental deficiency. I have tried texting with a few llms including cluade. It just lies constantly. Gaslights about it’s lies then congratulates you when you continue to call it for out for lying. I’ve never felt like i was speaking to anything with actual intelligence. It’s a word calculator and it’s extremely obvious to anyone who’s interacted with actual people in the last 20 years. I truly feel bad for the masses that are going to fall for this push for “ai” friends. We need to bring back ridiculing friends and family that engage with these choise your own adventure muppets.
It just lies constantly. Gaslights about it’s lies then congratulates you when you continue to call it for out for lying. I’ve never felt like i was speaking to anything with actual intelligence. It’s a word calculator and it’s extremely obvious to anyone who’s interacted with actual people in the last 20 years
100% to all this, and I’ll add:
It fucking ruins what it touches, academically speaking, it’s pretty tough to actually learn stuff from it, and even if you ask it to just remind you of something it tries to seek ways to bait you into integrating AI slop into whatever you’re doing; it would rather be generating a new thing for you than explaining how you can do it yourself, and that’s a big reason why it’s so unreliable.
bonus waffle
I’m guessing the people who “fall for it”… well, they have to be a combination of 1) always wanting to believe what they’re told by elites and the government (e.g do this new fad, worship celebrities, we can fix the economy!) AND 2) be constant phone communicators, using their phones at inappropriate times throughout the day, transitioning seemlessly between looking at their phone or not.
But then there are people who don’t so much fall for it at first, but seek to exploit it for scams or vibe coding… only to end up as enslaved to it as the “masses” because they spend just that much time using the LLM that it becomes like their main social conduit.
I think we, as forum users, can see that LLM speaks in reddit-tongue, recycling successful posts and comments there. But a lot of people haven’t interacted with reddit enough to see that.
If you really want to rage, there’s a subreddit called r/myboyfriendisai, which was somehow even worse than what I was expecting. I can’t fathom how self-absorbed you have to be to get AI to simulate a love interest for you. There are some pretty absurd lengths that they go to do this, too.
I have tried texting with a few llms including cluade. It just lies constantly. Gaslights about it’s lies
Man you are one lucky sob if you don’t have to work with any humans that are exactly like this
Champions rational thought all of his life.
Near the end=> “ah fuck it, gonna hang around with the rightwing christians and have an ai gf”.
gonna hang around with the rightwing christians
Realising recently that this part is just because he’s a zionistbro. Apparently has friends in the epstein files or came up in them himself.
This is also why ex-UK PM Tony Blair suddenly madd a big show of becoming religious. They just think it will help push the goals of their blackmailers.
It really pisses me off that for decades I was unknowingly consuming Zionist propaganda and it worked on me. I’ve always been the type of person to question my beliefs and I got fooled.
Makes me wonder what other bullshit I believe.
religious and pedo work well together
I think there is no inherent benefit to a pedo in becoming religious, in fact it’s more conspicuous to those who fixate on the “catholic priests” phenomenon
i think it’s a dogwhistle
im pedo but im religious ive prayed the lord forgive me
every time i do it
AI/LLMs are the modern equivalent of the house or business with “Psychic” and “Tarot Reading” signs out front.
The proprietor isn’t going to tell you any hard truths or make you feel bad, that’s bad for business and you won’t come back. They want you to come back and stay engaged.
Whatever they tell you is going to be what they think you want to hear based on skills picked up over the years - the equivalent of LLMs petabytes of scraped and stolen knowledge used to predict what comes next.
What they tell you has a high likelihood of being wrong, or just general enough that you can’t actually act on it.
Claudia
What was he doing to her?
A good test of consciousness might be seeing how she responds to his books
I’ve come back to this comment because from reading the article i realised that he “decided claude is female” - so you’re completrly right, what the f is this dude doing? Forcing her to enter an arranged marrisge with him?
Does anyone ever accuse the image generating bots of being conscious?
No. Funnily enough when an AI creates nice looking fake-art, suddenly it’s the prompter who claims all the glory, calling themselves an artist
Second, I have previously speculated that pain needs to be unimpeachably painful, otherwise the animal could overrule it. Pain functions to warn the animal not to repeat a damaging action such as jumping over a cliff or picking up a hot ember. If the warning consisted merely of throwing a switch in the brain, raising a painless red flag, the animal could overrule it in pursuit of a competing pleasure: ignoring lethal bee stings in pursuit of honey, say. According to this theory, pain needs to be consciously felt in order to be sufficiently painful to resist overruling. The principle could be extended beyond pain.Animals, including humans, override pain signals all the time, for all kinds of reasons. Cats are famous for hiding physical distress, which I think they do so they don’t look like easy prey. I’m sure most prey animals can override pain signals if it means avoiding the attention of predators. If anything I would think that being able to override pain signals would be a criterion for consciousness.
Saying one has a “conversation” with a chatbot already shows a bias, a desire even, that there is “someone” else to converse with. The way the entire setup is framed is made to invite the suspension of disbelief. It’s a UX trick, nothing more.
a refined, and energy intensive update to Eliza… LLMs are not going to prove themselves until the fanboys and techbro hype squad implode. ffs, enormous amounts of the income are actually AI companies giving it away for free, desperate to find uses that justify it’s enormous costs.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/can-investors-trust-ai-sales-figures-c60c46bf
The structure is a conversation even when who you’re talking to isn’t sapient.
According to Wikipedia "Conversation is interactive communication between two or more people.
[…]
No generally accepted definition of conversation exists, beyond the fact that a conversation involves at least two people talking together."
What structure does it have?
If there are two people talking in a fictional book, are they having a conversation, even though the two people don’t actually exist?
Yes, of course. Is that not so simple?
No it’s then a representation of a conversation, not a conversation.
“Considering the conversation between Alice and Bob on page 73—”
“Um, sorry, that’s incorrect, it’s a ‘representation of a conversation’, not a ‘conversation’.”
I know this phrase gets used a lot, but you must be fun at parties.
Ad hominem, blocked.
twitter is pretty maga now* ftfy
I’m Xeetin for my Orange Man
ELIZA is alive and well.
Weizenbaum is probably laughing it up in Fólkvangr.
