I should preface this by saying that I absolutely do not think LLMs (or any current-generation AI) are conscious, and I agree with a lot of the ethical positions that this author takes. This isn't...
I should preface this by saying that I absolutely do not think LLMs (or any current-generation AI) are conscious, and I agree with a lot of the ethical positions that this author takes.
This isn't a very good essay. The author seems to have a very tenuous grasp on the way that LLMs work. LLMs do not, for example, generate "only one word at a time" because they usually don't generate whole single words at all. Pointing out the stepwise nature and lack of continuous operation in LLM cognition is a perfectly cromulent argument that the author manages to garrote with a hamfisted, factually wrong description.
There is also an unstated assumption framing the central thesis that 'conscious' means 'similar to a human' that goes fully unsupported. For instance, this is asserted and left unjustified:
without a body, a computer program could have no desires or emotions
This is a statement that really needs some sort of philosophical foundation laid beneath it. Blowing straight past the mind-body problem in the middle of a long paragraph is not a compelling rhetorical move. Obviously if this is true then LLMs cannot be conscious, but it's been a running topic of debate for thousands of years!
I don't know, maybe I'm too deep in the rabbit hole on this. Is it unreasonable to ask for an essay on modern AI to have a reasonable technical understanding of how AI works? Or some sense of imagination that permits contemplating non-human sentience?
I should preface this by saying that I absolutely do not think LLMs (or any current-generation AI) are conscious, and I agree with a lot of the ethical positions that this author takes.
This isn't a very good essay. The author seems to have a very tenuous grasp on the way that LLMs work. LLMs do not, for example, generate "only one word at a time" because they usually don't generate whole single words at all. Pointing out the stepwise nature and lack of continuous operation in LLM cognition is a perfectly cromulent argument that the author manages to garrote with a hamfisted, factually wrong description.
There is also an unstated assumption framing the central thesis that 'conscious' means 'similar to a human' that goes fully unsupported. For instance, this is asserted and left unjustified:
This is a statement that really needs some sort of philosophical foundation laid beneath it. Blowing straight past the mind-body problem in the middle of a long paragraph is not a compelling rhetorical move. Obviously if this is true then LLMs cannot be conscious, but it's been a running topic of debate for thousands of years!
I don't know, maybe I'm too deep in the rabbit hole on this. Is it unreasonable to ask for an essay on modern AI to have a reasonable technical understanding of how AI works? Or some sense of imagination that permits contemplating non-human sentience?