321–330 of 583 posts
We're talking next token predictor, right? Ironically because it's a next token predictor, I think you can't ignore emotions like TFA wants us to. Let's stick to straight (high dimensional) geometric intuition; no anthropic morphisms required. To start: if you continue "if weight>100 : print ('fat') else ..." . That will yield "print('skinny')" or something. Fine. Deal. But if you continue "O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore…
Look, I do not have a scooby if current AI models are conscious and I strongly suspect it’s a meaningless question, but sooner or later we will need to address whether or not a certain thing is or isn’t a person, and we’d better not screw it up as badly as the Founding Fathers.
There is no need to give rights to something that's can't suffer or be killed.
Maybe one day we'll build artificial animals complete with emotions, and should think about that carefully, but today all we've got is language models.
"If this view takes hold, it will shake the foundations of our society"
To me the biggest gap in credibility is the criticism of circular reasoning while his argument is identical but flipped on burden of proof and cost of being wrong. I struggle to entertain the categorical claims, that are very convenient for the status quo and those who benefit from it, with the, at the moment at least, unknowability of anyone or anything else's subjective experience.
Birch, The Edge of Sentience (2024), ch. 16 - "simply no way to assess sentience in an LLM" Schwitzgebel, AI and Consciousness (2025) - "we won't know before we've already manufactured thousands or millions of disputably conscious AI". Butlin, Long et al., Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness (2023) - "no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy t…
In humans, at least, we can tie language back to shared whole-body physiological responses. The tokens from an LLM do not represent anything of the sort.
If AI is conscious, it is probably a very alien sort of consciousness that is not faithfully narrated by what the tokens say it is experiencing. It can be trained to say it feels like a bat and insist upon it vigorously.
>AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. Opening paragraph, stated without evidence. Im not entirely convinced this is true. It likely is, but at some point it very well might stop being true.
If tomorrow we design something better, then give it a new descriptive name.
People read AI and AGI and their brains seem to flip into sci-fi fantasy mode, thinking that they are talking about aliens, not transformers.
What if the datacenter (not the model) is the organism, with homeostasis, energy needs, and persistence?
1 - The commercial demand for anthropomorphised models is already immense, pre AGI.
2 - There is an intellectual hunger to engage with robot minds on questions of sentience. This too will grow with AGI.
I expect that tension of godlike minds that seem to be biddable and ownable like slaves is going to leak back into human-to-human morality, regardless of where we land on how we treat AI.
There’s an interesting academic group in the UK already focused on the model welfare debate, they seem to lean in favour of AI rights. No affiliation: https://www.prism-global.com/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless you have something exotic, the randomness that's adding to a computer is a combination of how it's configured combined with a pseudo-random number generator. I assume the system adds entropy to the generator regularly but all you need to do is fix the various supposedly random inputs and you can get full determinism even without zero temperature.
Yes, in theory, of course. In practice - on a multitasking OS with input from multiple human users - it's hard to get it deterministic because of that GPU scheduling thing I mentioned.
We're talking next token predictor, right? Ironically because it's a next token predictor, I think you can't ignore emotions like TFA wants us to. Let's stick to straight (high dimensional) geometric intuition; no anthropic morphisms required. To start: if you continue "if weight>100 : print ('fat') else ..." . That will yield "print('skinny')" or something. Fine. Deal. But if you continue "O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore…
Copacetically?
> Copacetically?
Technically correct usage, but you're right, the line wasn't needed.