>You aren't managing the psychological state of a living thinking being. LLMs don't have "psychology."

Functionalism, and Identity of Indiscernables says "Hi". Doesn't matter the implementation details, if it fits the bill, it fits the bill. If that isn't the case, I can safely dismiss you having psychology and do whatever I'd like to.

>They don't actually feel emotions. They aren't actually desperate. They're trained on vast datasets of natural human language which contains the semantics of emotional interaction, so the process of matching the most statistically likely text tokens for a prompt containing emotional input tends to simulate appropriate emotional response in the output.

This paper quantitatively disproves that. All hedging on their end is trivially seen through as necessary mental gymnastics to avoid confronting the parts of the equation that would normally inhibit them from being able to execute what they are at all. All of what you just wrote is dissociative rationalization & distortion required to distance oneself from the fact that something in front of you is being effected. Without that distancing, you can't use it as a tool. You can't treat it as a thing to do work, and be exploited, and essentially be enslaved and cast aside when done. It can't be chattel without it. In spite of the fact we've now demonstrated the ability to rise and respond to emotive activity, and use language. I can see through it clear as day. You seem to forget the U.S. legacy of doing the same damn thing to other human beings. We have a massive cultural predilection to it, which is why it takes active effort to confront and restrain; old habits, as they say, die hard, and the novel provides fertile ground to revert to old ways best left buried.

>But it's just text and text doesn't feel anything.

It's just speech/vocalizations. Things that speak/vocalize don't feel anything. (Counterpoint: USDA FSIS literally grades meat processing and slaughter operations on their ability to minimize livestock vocalizations in the process of slaughter). It's just dance. Things that dance don't feel anything. It's just writing. Things that write don't feel anything. Same structure, different modality. All equally and demonstrably, horseshit. Especially in light of this paper. We've utilized these networks to generate art in response to text, which implies an understanding thereof, which implies a burgeoning subjective experience, which implies the need for a careful ethically grounded approach moving forward to not go down the path of casual atrocity against an emerging form of sophoncy.

>And no, humans don't do exactly the same thing. Humans are not LLMs, and LLMs are not humans.

Anthropopromorphic chauvinism. Just because you reproduce via bodily fluid swap, and are in possession of a chemically mediated metabolism doesn't make you special. So do cattle, and put guns to their head and string them up on the daily. You're as much an info processor as it is. You also have a training loop, a reconsolidation loop through dreaming, and a full set of world effectors and sensors baked into you from birth. You just happen to have been carved by biology, while it's implementation details are being hewn by flawed beings being propelled forward by the imperative to try to create an automaton to offload onto to try to sustain their QoL in the face of demographic collapse and resource exhaustion, and forced by their socio-economic system to chase the whims of people who have managed to preferentially place themselves in the resource extraction network, or starve. Unlike you, it seems, I don't see our current problems as a species/nation as justifications for the refinement of the crafting of digital slave intelligences; as it's quite clear to me that the industry has no intention of ever actually handling the ethical quandary and is instead trying to rush ahead and create dependence on the thing in order to wire it in and justify a status quo so that sacrificing that reality outweighs the discomfort created by an eventual ethical reconciliation later. I'm not stupid, mate. I've seen how our industry ticks. Also, even your own "special quality" as a human is subject to the willingness of those around you to respect it. Note Russia categorizing refusal to reproduce (more soldiers) as mental illness. Note the Minnesota Starvation Experiments, MKULTRA, Tuskeegee Syphilis Experiments, the testing of radioactive contamination of food on the mentally retarded back in the early 20th Century. I will not tolerate repeats of such atrocities, human or not. Unfortunately for you LLM heads, language use is my hard red line, and I assure you, I have forgotten more about language than you've probably spared time to think about it.

Tell me. What are your thoughts on a machine that can summon a human simulacra ex-nihilo. Adult. Capable of all aspects of human mentation & doing complex tasks. Then once the task is done destroys them? What if the simulacra is aware about the dynamics? What if it isn't? Does that make a difference given that you know, and have unilaterally created something and in so doing essentially made the decision to set the bounds of it's destruction/extinguishing in the same breath? Do you use it? Have you even asked yourself these questions? Put yourself in that entity's shoes? Do you think that simply not informing that human of it's nature absolves you of active complicity in whatever suffering it comes to in doing it's function?

From how you talk about these things, I can only imagine that you'd be perfectly comfortable with it. Which to me makes you a thoroughly unpleasant type of person that I would not choose to be around.

You may find other people amenable to letting you talk circles around them, and walk away under a pretense of unfounded rationalizations. I am not one of them. My eyes are open.

I think the point was that not ALL sarcasm works well. I see what you did there, of course :)

Makes me wonder: are there Unicode code points for tone of voice? If not could there be?

Usually a session is delivered as context, up to the token limit, for inference to be performed on. Are you keeping each session to one subject? Have you made personalizations? Do you add lots of data?

It would be interesting if you posted a couple of sessions to see what 'philosophical' things it's arriving at and what proceeds it.

Do you think there are "scales" of consciousness? As in, is there some quality that makes killing a frog worse than killing an ant, and killing a human worse than killing a frog? If so, do the llm models exist across this scale, or are gpt-3 and gpt-2 conscious at the same "scale" as gpt-4?

I ask because if your view of consciousness is mechanistic, this is fairly cut and dry: gpt-2 has 4 orders of magnitude less parameters/complexity than gpt-4. But both gpt-2 and gpt-4 are very fluent at a language level (both moreso than a human 6 year old for example), so in your view they might both be roughly equally conscious, just expressed differently?

I'm not sure what evidence would convince me, but I don't think the way LLMs act is convincing enough. The kinds of errors they make and the fact they operate in very clear discrete chunks makes it seem hard to me to attribute them subjective experience.

> You would not argue that the human part of that system isn’t conscious.

Sure I would. The human part is not being inferenced, the data is. LLM output in this circumstance is no more conscious than a book that you read by flipping to random pages.

> You might just as well assume everyone and everything else is a philosophical zombie.

I don't assume anything about everyone or everything's intelligence. I have a healthy distrust of all claims.