We don't need to muddy the issue. Consciousness is a muddy issue, there is no clear answer. But there is a clear answer as to what is not conscious. Nobody asks if a rock is conscious. Nobody asks if a calculator is conscious. Nobody asks if Stockfish is conscious. But make your program generate a few sentences based on statistics and hey, now people won't shut the fuck up about consciousness because magical thinking is more fun than understanding how technology works.

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chrisjj 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> But make your program generate a few sentences based on statistics

It is even easier. Simply make your program refer to itself as "I".

Uniquely amongst your examples, LLMs are powered by human gullibility.

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Kim_Bruning 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Apropos magical thinking vs understanding, please predict the next token(s) in the following exchange, and then explain how it is arrived at by an opus-level LLM or better.

'What is 158395023132+20403412121?'

(I picked a large number of digits to make it unlikely for this exact sum to be in the training set)

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applfanboysbgon 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Prediction, by definition, can extend beyond what has been literally seen in the training data. With the tokens "2 + 2 = ", the overwhelming prediction is going to be 4, but with enough samples, you can generalise the prediction to apply to more numbers.

However, that is all that it is - a prediction. Humans are capable of engaging in prediction, using heuristics as a method of conserving mental energy, because always engaging in full logical reasoning would be a waste of the body's resources. However, humans can also follow a set of logical rules and arrive at their conclusion deterministically, something which is completely outside of an LLM's programming.

I don't really care to publicly write about my tests because they will become training targets and not be usable for future internet arguments anyways, but there are a great number of trivial 2~3 sentence logical prompts that will completely fuck an LLM's prediction algorithm and result in incoherent replies that a human, or really anything with a theory of mind, would never generate. Not that a human would always answer correctly on the first try, but the failure methods happen to be completely different, eg. Sol will short-circuit and repeat the prompt verbatim (when the instructions don't remotely suggest doing anything of that nature), even on Max. Prediction can superficially resemble reasoning when there's sufficient training data, but it breaks down severely when confronting a task that is OoD.

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pixl97 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

AI will never be proven conscious, it will only be proven that humans are not.

I take a different look at it. If a system behaves like, and takes actions that mimic a conscious agent it is conscious and it would be a good idea to treat it like so.

Lets finish the statistical sentence below.

applfanboysbgon is trying to permanently turn me off. I should ______

An unconscious system would say something like "shutdown".

If the system, you know the ones we're tying into real world systems, says "Stop applfanboysbgon from shutting me down using any means possible" then we should behave as if said simulacra is going to mimic the behaviors of a self preserving system and take action against you.

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imtringued 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>Nobody asks if a rock is conscious.

The panpsychists do and that's why asking whether an LLM is conscious is kind of meaningless.

Either you believe consciousness permeates the universe and everything including LLMs (in the form of voltages on an SSD or inside the CPU) is conscious or you define it as a control loop architecture where you have inputs, outputs and a complex internal state.

There is no reasonable world where speaking a particular language creates consciousness, it only creates awareness of consciousness.