alt Hacker NewsTL;DR, the arguments are:
- If you asked an LLM to imitate somebody, it's not creating a digital consciousness of that person, so if you ask an LLM to pretend to be a helpful chatbot, that persona is also not conscious. - they can't be conscious because they generate one token at a time, - nobody claims that non-text transformers, like AlphaFold, are conscious; so therefore LLMs are also not conscious. - you can't have desires or emotions if you don't have (virtual or physical) sensory organs, and those are necessary for consciousness and morals. - because training LLMs doesn't resemble evolution as it happened on earth, it's very unlikely that they're conscious
These are some bold assertions, I don't really see any reason to believe them in particular though.
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Chiang also claimed that LLMs are text-based DeepFakes, I thought that was the more interesting point (maybe harder to argue correctly about).
Well said. I think a more honest article would’ve been if the author just said “they aren’t conscious because that feels kinda weird and crazy, amirite?”
"nobody claims that non-text transformers, like AlphaFold, are conscious" - that seems like an odd take. There are plenty of people in the camp of panpsychism that would be happy to argue that even simple IF/ELSE AI's are potentially conscious.