You can't do the same with a toaster. Physically you could write that story. But it would fall flat because the toaster is not a compelling subject in a discussion of consciousness. You don't have to believe that LLMs or AI agents are conscious to acknowledge that the argument for their consciousness is far more compelling than any other technological artifact.

Not having yet read the original story, this reads fine on its own.

And I didn't see it as much as a literary attempt for art's sake, but more of a dialogue-based technical parable trying to convey a real-world insight. Kind of like the ones in Godel Escher Bach.

>You could perform exactly the same rhetorical trick with a toaster or anything else.

Not sure which rhetorical trick is that. The point of the story, as I read it, is the technical insight (and some social implications of it).

P.S. Read the original too. Seems like the exact same could have been written about us instead of the original, if the focus wasn't on our substrate, but on our brain processing. Which, after all, is also about weights.

I was having a hard time pinning down what bothered me about this but I think you put it pretty well.

It draws an analogy between us and the skeptical aliens in the original story which feel silly to us, so the obvious implication is that we're being as silly as they were.

But it doesn't really give a reason to accept the analogy, it just asserts it.

There's a big difference between a whole civilization and a piece of software that can output text.

I feel the original story contained in it the whole point of this one, and then some.

This did not add anything, just rephrased it so rather than humans viewed through the pov of aliens it's LLMs viewed through the pov of humans. Well, we are the humans, so surely we do not need to learn about this point of view?

The original did not come out of a vacuum. It was done on multiple generations of meat. Even though this one uses a little bit of silicon, it is still standing on the same shoulders.