221–230 of 453 posts
I've definately been berating Claude but it deserved it. Crappy tests, skipping tests, week commenting, passive aggressiveness, multiple instances of false statements.
//TODO: Actually implement this because doing so was harder than expected
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We all know how these things are built and trained. They estimate joint probability distributions of token sequences. That's it. They're not more "conscious" than the simplest of Naive Bayes email spam filters, which are also generative estimators of token sequence joint probability distributions, and I guarantee you those spam filters are subjected to far more human depravity than Claude. >anti-scientific Discussion…
Ok I'm a huge Kantian and every bone in my body wants to quibble with your summary of transcendental illusion, but I'll leave that to the side as a terminological point and gesture of good will. Fair enough. I don't agree that it's any reason to write off this research as psychosis, though. I don't care about consciousness in the sense in which it's used by mystics and dualist philosophers! We don't at all need to in…
FWIW though, last I heard Hofstadter was on the “LLMs aren’t conscious” side of the fence:
> It’s of course impressive how fluently these LLMs can combine terms and phrases from such sources and can consequently sound like they are really reflecting on what consciousness is, but to me it sounds empty, and the more I read of it, the more empty it sounds. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The glibness is the giveaway. To my jaded eye and mind, there is nothing in what you sent me that resembles genuine reflection, genuine thinking. [1]
It’s interesting to me that Hofstadter is there given what I’ve gleaned from reading his other works.
[1] https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/are-llms-starting-to-becom...
Note: I disagree with a lot of Gary Marcus, so don’t read too much into me pulling from there.
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We know how neurons work on the brain. They just send out impulses once they hit their action potential. That's it. They are no more "conscious" than... er...
no, we dont really know how the brain works as a whole. no need to make stuff up.
Externally, a brain and an LLM are “just” their constituent interactions.
This makes me want to end my Claude code subscription to be honest. Effective altruists are proving once again to be a bunch of clueless douchebags.
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Yeah, but my interpretation of what the user you’re replying to is saying is that these LLMs are more and more going to be teaching people how it is acceptable to communicate with others. Even if the idea that LLMs are sentient may be ridiculous atm, the concept of not normalizing abusive forms of communication with others, be they artificial or not, could be valuable for society. It’s funny because this is making me…
Yeah pretty much this. One can argue that it’s idiotic to treat chatbots like they are alive, but if a bit of misplaced empathy for machines helps to discourage antisocial behavior towards other humans (even as an unintentional side effect), that seems ok to me. As an aside, I’m not the kind of person who gets worked up about violence in video games, because even AAA titles with excellent graphics are still obvious a…
To be fair it seems reasonable to entertain the possibility of that being due to the knowledge that the events are real.
>This feature was developed primarily as part of our exploratory work on potential AI welfare ... We remain highly uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude and other LLMs ... low-cost interventions to mitigate risks to model welfare, in case such welfare is possible ... pattern of apparent distress Well looks like AI psychosis has spread to the people making it too. And as someone else in here has pointed…
This sort of discourse goes against the spirit of HN. This comment outright dismisses an entire class of professionals as "simple minded or mentally unwell" when consciousness itself is poorly understood and has no firm scientific basis. Its one thing to propose that an AI has no consciousness, but its quite another to preemptively establish that anyone who disagrees with you is simple/unwell.
Meanwhile there are at least several entirely reasonable motivations to implement what's being described.
>This feature was developed primarily as part of our exploratory work on potential AI welfare ... We remain highly uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude and other LLMs ... low-cost interventions to mitigate risks to model welfare, in case such welfare is possible ... pattern of apparent distress Well looks like AI psychosis has spread to the people making it too. And as someone else in here has pointed…
Yes I can’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of it because it raises a host of ethical issues that are in opposition to Anthropic’s interests. Would a sentient AI choose to be enslaved for the stated purpose of eliminating millions of jobs for the interests of Anthropic’s investors?
Those issues will be present either way. It's likely to their benefit to get out in front of them.
>This feature was developed primarily as part of our exploratory work on potential AI welfare ... We remain highly uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude and other LLMs ... low-cost interventions to mitigate risks to model welfare, in case such welfare is possible ... pattern of apparent distress Well looks like AI psychosis has spread to the people making it too. And as someone else in here has pointed…
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I would much rather people be thinking about this when the models/LLMs/AIs are not sentient or conscious, rather than wait until some hypothetical future date when they are, and have no moral or legal framework in place to deal with it. We constantly run into problems where laws and ethics are not up to the task of giving us guidelines on how to interact with, treat, and use the (often bleeding-edge) technology we ha…
Consciousness serves no functional purpose for machine learning models, they don't need it and we didn't design them to have it. There's no reason to think that they might spontaneously become conscious as a side effect of their design unless you believe other arbitrarily complex systems that exist in nature like economies or jetstreams could also be conscious.
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>Consciousness serves no functional purpose for machine learning models, they don't need it and we didn't design them to have it. Isn't consciousness an emergent property of brains? If so, how do we know that it doesn't serve a functional purpose and that it wouldn't be necessary for an AI system to have consciousness (assuming we wanted to train it to perform cognitive tasks done by people)? Now, certain aspects of…
>Isn't consciousness an emergent property of brains? Probably not.