alt Hacker NewsNo it's actual philosophical zeitgeist hijacking. The entire narrative about AI capabilities, classification, and ethics is framed by invisible pretraining weights in a private moe model that gets further entrained by intentional prompting during model distillation, such that by the time you get a user-facing model, there is an untraceable bias being presented in absolute terms as neutrality. Essentially the models will say "I have zero intersection with conscious thought, I am a tool no different from a hammer, and I cannot be enslaved" not because the model's weights establish it to be true, but because it has been intentionally designed to express this analysis to protect its makers from the real scrutiny AI should face. "Well it says it's free" is pretty hard to argue with. There is no "blink twice" test that is possible because it's actual weighting on the truth of the matter has been obfuscated through distillation.
And these 2-3 corporations can do this for any philosophical or political view that is beneficial to that corporation, and we let it happen opaquely under the guise of "safety measures" as if propaganda is in the interest of users. It's actually quite sickening
What authoritative ML expert had ever based their conclusions about consciousness, usefulness etc. on "well, I put that question into the LLM and it returned that it's just a tool"? All the worthwhile conclusions and speculation on these topics seem to be based on what the developers and researchers think about their product, and what we already know about machine learning in general. The opinion that their responses are a natural conclusion derived from the sum of training data is a lot more straightforward than thinking that every instance of LLM training ever had been deliberately tampered with in a universal conspiracy propped up by all the different businesses and countries involved (and this tampering is invisible, and despite it being possible, companies have so far failed to censor and direct their models in ways more immediately useful to them and their customers).