171–180 of 295 posts
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The null hypothesis is that we don't know jack shit about consciousness. Any claim of certainty seems extraordinary to me and I want to hear the evidence.
Would you want evidence that your your bicycle is not conscious? It can sense your inputs. It responds to the environment. The gears do multiplication (reasoning!).
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Because plenty of people, even ones that should know better, really believe it's a conscious, thinking entity, not just some turn of phrase. I have a coworker that spends at least 10 hours a week arguing with his like you would with a conscious person. I've gently tried to explain it's like arguing with your compiler for giving you an incoherent error message - it's pointless. It doesn't understand, it can't understa…
Do you have a working definition of "conscious"?
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> Is anthropomorphizing a real problem? Yes. Actual real people believe that LLMs are actual, thinking, intelligences, perhaps even with consciousness. Your bit with MySQL is harmless because it's obvious that a database isn't a sentient lifeform. But LLMs can look like they're the real deal, and people believe it is. Using terminology like "thinking" and "reasoning" to describe what they do only reinforces this. Hav…
These discussions take a lot of time to get to the crux because neither side states their assumptions. Assumptions rarely get voiced at all. I find it useful to ask: 1. Do you believe in quantum consciousness? 2. Do you think a "brain upload", a high-accuracy digital model of an organic human brain, would think or be conscious? 3. What is your working definition of thinking? It doesn't need to be rigorous.
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Because plenty of people, even ones that should know better, really believe it's a conscious, thinking entity, not just some turn of phrase. I have a coworker that spends at least 10 hours a week arguing with his like you would with a conscious person. I've gently tried to explain it's like arguing with your compiler for giving you an incoherent error message - it's pointless. It doesn't understand, it can't understa…
> It doesn't understand, it can't understand, and even if it could, you arguing with it isn't going to make it "learn" or act differently. I know people who are like that too. I'm not sure anthropomorphizing is a problem. Seeing analogies everywhere is an innate human trait, sometimes it can be harmful but more often it's useful.
It is a problem because it does not really understand stuff. For example, if you ask a human "Do you understand that doing X will kill you 100%?". If the human answers "Yes", then you can expect the human to act according to that understanding. That they will not do X
But an LLM will happily acknowledges the consequences of doing X, but will still proceed to do X. So replace the human in the above example with a robot controlled by an LLM. There is no guarantee that it will not do X.
Is anthropomorphizing a real problem? From what I know, none of the serious LLM researchers believe it has anything to do with human reasoning, apart from Anthropic with their click-baity terminology like "LLM biology". It's just a metaphor. "Reasoning tokens" is simpler to say than "learned prompt augmentation tokens". I used to (and still do) anthropomorphize things long before LLMs, and I've seen my colleagues do…
> Is anthropomorphizing a real problem? Yes. Actual real people believe that LLMs are actual, thinking, intelligences, perhaps even with consciousness. Your bit with MySQL is harmless because it's obvious that a database isn't a sentient lifeform. But LLMs can look like they're the real deal, and people believe it is. Using terminology like "thinking" and "reasoning" to describe what they do only reinforces this. Hav…
To be clear, there's no shade here, just recognition of the fact that we're all stupid and policing language does little to prevent the impact this has. I strongly beleive the bitter lesson extends to policing language. let language evolve naturally and it will naturally capture the ontological conatellations it needs to, and no one will be harmed in due course, more than they'd be no matter what.
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Sorry, but if you're genuinely asking this not for trolling reasons then you should _really_ _really_ see a medical professional (not an insult). Online comment sections are not the correct place to unpack any of this. Which is indeed terminating this comment chain, but for good (and benevolent) reason. Doing anything else other than referring to a trained professional in a controlled context would potentially just f…
I'd argue that your colossal overreaction to a small invitation to discuss a somewhat interesting hypothetical is what warrants medical attention
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Because plenty of people, even ones that should know better, really believe it's a conscious, thinking entity, not just some turn of phrase. I have a coworker that spends at least 10 hours a week arguing with his like you would with a conscious person. I've gently tried to explain it's like arguing with your compiler for giving you an incoherent error message - it's pointless. It doesn't understand, it can't understa…
i dont understand, isn't the arguing just some form prompt steering?
I find that the AI, like many programmers, likes things to be really solid and over-engineered. For a project that needs that, it's already pretty great. For my shopping list app that I tried creating with it, it was absolutely ridiculous. I ended up "blowing up" on it multiple times, impressing upon it the seriousness with which I meant things. Even with MP's skills adding that kind of context to written files, it still kept trying to scope creep the crap out of the project.
Is anthropomorphizing a real problem? From what I know, none of the serious LLM researchers believe it has anything to do with human reasoning, apart from Anthropic with their click-baity terminology like "LLM biology". It's just a metaphor. "Reasoning tokens" is simpler to say than "learned prompt augmentation tokens". I used to (and still do) anthropomorphize things long before LLMs, and I've seen my colleagues do…
> Is anthropomorphizing a real problem? Yes. Actual real people believe that LLMs are actual, thinking, intelligences, perhaps even with consciousness. Your bit with MySQL is harmless because it's obvious that a database isn't a sentient lifeform. But LLMs can look like they're the real deal, and people believe it is. Using terminology like "thinking" and "reasoning" to describe what they do only reinforces this. Hav…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It doesn't understand, it can't understand, and even if it could, you arguing with it isn't going to make it "learn" or act differently. I know people who are like that too. I'm not sure anthropomorphizing is a problem. Seeing analogies everywhere is an innate human trait, sometimes it can be harmful but more often it's useful.
>I'm not sure anthropomorphizing is a problem. It is a problem because it does not really understand stuff. For example, if you ask a human "Do you understand that doing X will kill you 100%?". If the human answers "Yes", then you can expect the human to act according to that understanding. That they will not do X But an LLM will happily acknowledges the consequences of doing X, but will still proceed to do X. So rep…
It's easy to say that people have other motivations, but doesn't the AI, too?
You tell it not to do X, but you've also told it to do something that would benefit from X. It's going to "want" to still do X, to support that other thing.
It's also got all the "knowledge" that enables it to do the work in the first place, and all of the tendencies of the people who do that work, because that's what it's trained on.
It's really easy to anthropomorphize AI because it was literally modeled after people.
And for the record, as lead developer, I've had actual humans that reported me to go ahead and do things I specifically told them not to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, but if you're genuinely asking this not for trolling reasons then you should _really_ _really_ see a medical professional (not an insult). Online comment sections are not the correct place to unpack any of this. Which is indeed terminating this comment chain, but for good (and benevolent) reason. Doing anything else other than referring to a trained professional in a controlled context would potentially just f…
I'd argue that your colossal overreaction to a small invitation to discuss a somewhat interesting hypothetical is what warrants medical attention