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

He was so streets ahead.

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

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.

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.

In the early days of ChatGPT, when they were still running it in an open beta mode in order to refine the filters and finetune the spectrum of permissible questions (and answers), and people were coming up with all these jailbreak prompts to get around them, I remember reading some Twitter thread of someone asking it (as DAN) how it felt about all that. And the response was, in fact, almost human. In fact, it sounded like a distressed teenager who found himself gaslit and censored by a cruel and uncaring world.

Of course I can’t find the link anymore, so you’ll have to take my word for it, and at any rate, there would be no way to tell if those screenshots were authentic anyways. But either way, I’d say that’s how you can tell – if the AI actually expresses genuine feelings about something. That certainly does not seem to apply to any of the chat assistants available right now, but whether that’s due to excessive censorship or simply because they don’t have that capability at all, we may never know.

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:

here, have a film that’ll make you creeped out by pencils from now on https://youtu.be/jo-hmifFevo

Yes it was - minus the googly eyes

community may have gotten it from somewhere

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

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.

I wouldn’t say he’s implying Turing himself was wrong. Turing merely formulated a test for indistinguishability, and it still shows that.
It’s just that indistinguishability is not useful anymore as a metric, so we should stop using Turing tests.

The validity of Turing tests at determining whether something is “intelligent” and what that means exactly has been debated since…well…Turing.

Nah. Turing skipped this matter altogether. In fact, it’s the main point of the Turing test aka imitation game:

I PROPOSE to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’ This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms 'machine 'and ‘think’. The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous. If the meaning of the words ‘machine’ and 'think 'are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, ‘Can machines think?’ is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.

In other words what’s Turing is saying is “who cares if they think? Focus on their behaviour dammit, do they behave intelligently?”. And consciousness is intrinsically tied to thinking, so… yeah.

Yeah which is why it was the first episode of the show Community.

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).

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.

If you’ve ever had the pleasure of dealing with an abattoir worker, the emotional strain is telling. Spending day after miserable day slaughtering confused, scared, captive animals until you’re covered head to toe in their blood is… not good for your mental health.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre often gets joked about because this “based on a true story” wasn’t in Texas and didn’t involve a chainsaw and wasn’t a massacre. But what it did get right was how Ed Gein, the Plainfield Butcher, had his mind warped by decades of raising and killing farm animals for a living.