We don't even know how to disprove that this statement with "AI" replaced by "other humans" other than by listening to people self-reporting and taking their word for it and/or defining the words in ways that do not rely on a subjective experience.

Until we know how to objectively measure if someone or something is conscious, it seems unreasonable to make statements with any kind of certainty about it.

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bee_rider 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What sort of action does that lack of understanding actually motivate, though?

I don’t know if LLMs are conscious or have subjective experience in some philosophical sense. Sure, I don’t know that about other humans as well, rigorously speaking. But I also don’t know that about coffee machines, rivers, videogame NPCs, or even rocks really. (List ordered, of course, by the degree to which I’m willing to be convinced).

	▲	vidarh 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Hopefully it'd motivate attempts to figure out how to objectively define and measure consciousness, for starters. It matters precisely in the context of the subject of this article. If you believe the models at some level gain consciousness, then it raises moral questions about how you treat them. With humans we generally choose to accept that because we believe they are like us, they probably have inner life like us, but as you can see from e.g. the recent (and regular) articles on aphantasia, most people have really poor intuition even about the inner life of other humans, so we understand consciousness really poorly. Even if we assume (without evidence) that LLMs for the foreseeable future will remain far away from human level consciousness, as it is we tend to consider it problematic to mistreat even the most unintelligent animals, and even mistreating insects is used as a stereotypical way of depicting serious lack of empathy. Without dismissing the possibility out of hand, there's an escalating series of questions there of when or if they'll have as much (or little) sense of being as, say, a fly, a mouse, a house pet, and what moving up that ladder would mean. To some it is very convenient then to assume blindly that LLMs are just "stochastic parrots" (a line that ironically gets endlessly parroted), or similar, and dismiss the question out of hand as an impossibility, even though we do not know. I'll stress I don't go around assuming an LLM is like a human. But we also do not know whether there are flickers of consciousness there, and we do not know how to find out given that even for other humans, the best we know is to measure their response to tests that are "only" telling us how they react. If we can't find a better measure, there will be a point where we have to wonder if it matters, or whether the ability to act-as-if is all there is. But to start with maybe we should at least be careful about making firm claims about knowing.

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willy_k 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure, if you take a materialist empiricist perspective, which is myopic at best. As humans we have the unique and wonderful ability to know truths by themselves. Machines do not have minds, and they can not.

	▲	ooloncoloophid 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		What position are you taking? (Genuine question.) Do you believe humans are conscious because of a special property we have? If you are a dualist, how do you explain the interaction in physical space between the non-physical special property and the physical brain?
	▲	vidarh 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		You have absolutely no evidence for any of these assertions. This is a religious belief in the total absence of evidence, not science.
	▲	rcxdude 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Good luck convincing others of these truths you know without evidence or argument, though.