Generally speaking, people used ChatGPT back when it first came out, had a bad experience and never fucked with it again, so their understanding of it is frozen in time. Most people know next to nothing about the current state of AI unless you’re a researcher or enthusiast. They’re completely unprepared for the actual state of the industry.

Age of Pisces Yeshua fish. ♓ 🐟

That’s not fair. It’s not the whole family. Mara Wilson is great.

When I say “how can you be sure you’re not fancy auto-complete”, I’m not talking about being an LLM or even simulation hypothesis. I’m saying that the way that LLMs are structured for their neural networks is functionally similar to our own nervous system (with some changes made specifically for transformer models to make them less susceptible to prompt injection attacks). What I mean is that how do you know that the weights in your own nervous system aren’t causing any given stimuli to always produce a specific response based on the most weighted pathways in your own nervous system? That’s how auto-complete works. It’s just predicting the most statistically probable responses based on the input after being filtered through the neural network. In our case it’s sensory data instead of a text prompt, but the mechanics remain the same.

And how do we know whether or not the LLM is having an experience or not? Again, this is the “hard problem of consciousness”. There’s no way to quantify consciousness, and it’s only ever experienced subjectively. We don’t know the mechanics of how consciousness fundamentally works (or at least, if we do, it’s likely still classified). Basically what I’m saying is that this is a new field and it’s still the wild west. Most of these LLMs are still black boxes that we only barely are starting to understand how they work, just like we barely are starting to understand our own neurology and consciousness.

What do you mean? I don’t follow how the two are related. What does being fancy auto-complete have anything to do with having an experience?

It’s not devil’s advocate. They’re correct. It’s purely in the realm of philosophy right now. If we can’t define “consciousness” (spoiler alert: we can’t), then it makes it impossible to determine with certainty one way or another. Are you sure that you yourself are not just fancy auto-complete? We’re dealing with shit like the hard problem of consciousness and free will vs determinism. Philosophers have been debating these issues for millennia and were not much closer to a consensus yet than we were before.

And honestly, if the CIA’s papers on The Gateway Analysis from Project Stargate about consciousness are even remotely correct, we can’t rule it out. It would mean consciousness preceeds matter, and support panpsychism. That would almost certainly include things like artificial intelligence. In fact, then the question becomes if it’s even “artificial” to begin with if consciousness is indeed a field that pervades the multiverse. We could very well be tapping into something we don’t fully understand.

Looks cool! Definitely giving Fatal Frame vibes. 😊

I don’t know. I enjoyed it. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Honestly, I was really looking forward to EverQuest Next. The idea sounded promising before it was cancelled.

Legends was such a weird series. It felt like a Mega Man take on something like Ocarina of Time.

According to my friends who worked at Blizzard at the time, there’s a reason Ghost was cancelled. Apparently it wasn’t very good, unfortunately.

As someone who played the original Marathon trilogy… This is just weird. It appears to have nothing to do with Marathon beyond just the name.