alt Hacker NewsPersonally I think that kind of discussion is fruitless, not much more than entertainment.
If you’re asking big questions like “can a machine think?” Or “is an AI conscious?” without doing the work of clarifying your concepts, then you’re only going to get vague ideas, sci-fi cultural tropes, and a host of other things.
I think the output question is also interesting enough on its own, because we can talk about the pragmatic effects of ChatGPT on writing without falling into this woo trap of thinking ChatGPT is making the human capacity for expression somehow extinct. But this requires one to cut through the hype and reactionary anti-hype, which is not an easy thing to do.
That is how I myself see AI: immensely useful new tools, but in no way some kind of new entity or consciousness, at least without doing the real philosophical work to figure out what that actually means.
Replies
I do think it raises interesting and important philosophical questions. Just look at all the literature around the Turing test--both supporters and detractors. This has been a fruitful avenue to talk about intelligence even before the advent of gpt.
I agree with almost all of this.
IMO the issue is we won't be able to adequately answer this question before we first clearly describe what we mean of conscious thinking applied to ourselves. First we'd need to clearly define our own consciousness and what we mean by our own "conscious thinking" in a much, much clearer way than we currently do.
If we ever reach that point, I think we'd be able to fruitfully apply it to AI, etc., to assess.
Unfortunately we haven't been obstructed from answering this question about ourselves for centuries or millennia, but have failed to do so, so it's unlikely to happen suddenly now. Unless we use AIs to first solve that problem of defining our own consciousness, before applying it back on them. Which would be a deeply problematic order, since nobody would trust a breakthrough in the understanding of consciousness that came from AI, that is then potentially used to put them in the same class and define them as either thinking things or conscious things.
Kind of a shame we didn't get our own consciousness worked out before AI came along. Then again, wasn't for the lack of trying… Philosophy commanded the attention of great thinkers for a long time.