the_wise_man's recent activity
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Comment on The literary world’s DEI checklist in ~books
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Comment on No, artificial intelligence is not conscious in ~tech
the_wise_man LinkI 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?
The bypass paywalls clean extension by magnolia1234 still works great. You'll have to Google for it and install it manually because it's been long kicked off of the Firefox extension store.