We've been had

Finishing up a rewatch through Community as we speak. Funny to see the gimmick (purportedly) used in real life.

He was so streets ahead.

That was my first thought!

Does anybody else feel rather solipsistic or is it just me?

Let's try to skip the philosophical mental masturbation, and focus on practical philosophical matters.

Consciousness can be a thousand things, but let's say that it's "knowledge of itself". As such, a conscious being must necessarily be able to hold knowledge.

In turn, knowledge boils down to a belief that is both

• true - it does not contradict the real world, and
• justified - it's build around experience and logical reasoning

LLMs show awful logical reasoning*, and their claims are about things that they cannot physically experience. Thus they are unable to justify beliefs. Thus they're unable to hold knowledge. Thus they don't have conscience.

*Here's a simple practical example of that:

We don't even know what we mean when we say "humans are conscious".

Also I have yet to see a rebuttal to "consciousness is just an emergent neurological phenomenon and/or a trick the brain plays on itself" that wasn't spiritual and/or cooky.

Look at the history of things we thought made humans humans, until we learned they weren't unique. Bipedality. Speech. Various social behaviors. Tool-making. Each of those were, in their time, fiercely held as "this separates us from the animals" and even caused obvious biological observations to be dismissed. IMO "consciousness" is another of those, some quirk of our biology we desperately cling on to as a defining factor of our assumed uniqueness.

To be clear LLMs are not sentient, or alive. They're just tools. But the discourse on consciousness is a distraction, if we are one day genuinely confronted with this moral issue we will not find a clear binary between "conscious" and "not conscious". Even within the human race we clearly see a spectrum. When does a toddler become conscious? How much brain damage makes someone "not conscious"? There are no exact answers to be found.

I'd say that, in a sense, you answered your own question by asking a question.

ChatGPT has no curiosity. It doesn't ask about things unless it needs specific clarification. We know you're conscious because you can come up with novel questions that ChatGPT wouldn't ask spontaneously.

Yes it was - minus the googly eyes

We met you only just at noon, A friend like Tim we barely knew. Taken from us far too soon, Yellow Standard #2.

Humans are so good at imagining things alive that just reading a story about Timmy the pencil is eliciting feelings of sympathy and reactions.

We are not good judges of things in general. Maybe one day these AI tools will actually help us and give us better perception and wisdom for dealing with the universe, but that end-goal is a lot further away than the tech-bros want to admit. We have decades of absolute slop and likely a few disasters to wade through.

And there's going to be a LOT of people falling in love with super-advanced chat bots that don't experience the world in any way.

Look at the bright side: there are two Tiny Timmys now.

That's why I love Ex Machina so much. Way ahead of its time both in showing the hubris of rich tech-bros and the dangers of false empathy.

i mean, i just read the post to my very sweet, empathetic teen. her immediate reaction was, "nooo, Tim! 😢"

edit - to clarify, i don't think she was reacting to an outburst, i think she immediately demonstrated that some people anthropomorphize very easily.

humans are social creatures (even if some of us don't tend to think of ourselves that way). it serves us, and the majority of us are very good at imagining what others might be thinking (even if our imaginings don't reflect reality), or identifying faces where there are none (see - outlets, googly eyes).

Right, it's shocking that he snaps the pencil because the listeners were playing along, and then he suddenly went from pretending to have a friend to pretending to murder said friend. It's the same reason you might gasp when a friendly NPC gets murdered in your D&D game: you didn't think they were real, but you were willing to pretend they were.

The AI hype doesn't come from people who are pretending. It's a different thing.

Seriously, I get that AI is annoying in how it's being used these days, but has the second guy seriously never heard of "anthropomorphizing"? Never seen Castaway? Or played Portal?

Nobody actually thinks these things are conscious, and for AI I've never heard even the most diehard fans of the technology claim it's "conscious."

(edit): I guess, to be fair, he did say "imagining" not "believing". But now I'm even less sure what his point was, tbh.

We’re good at scamming investors into thinking that a room full of monkeys on typewriters can be “AI.”

Current generations of LLM from everything I've learned are basically really, really, really large rooms of monkeys pounding on keyboards. The algorithm that sifts through that mess to find actual meaning isn't even particularly new or revolutionary, we just never had databases large enough that can be indexed fast enough to actually find the emergent patterns and connections between fields.

If you pile enough libraries in front of you and can sift out the exact lines that you know will make you feel a certain way, you can arrange that pile of information in ways that will give you almost any result you want.

The thing that tricks a lot of us is we're never really conscious of what we want. We want to be tricked though, we want to control and manipulate something that seems conscious for our own ends, that gives a feeling of power so your brain validates the experience by telling you the story that it's alive. You see pictures that look neat and depict the scenes you wanted to see in your mind, so your brain convinces you that it's inventing things out of nothing and that it has to be magically smart to be able to mash pikachu with darth vader.