Evolutionary biology will eventually incorporate tech.

I still don't understand how it can seem this way, and the fact that so many people seem to think so feels like a massive failure of the education system to instill the most basic of critical thinking skills. Once every month or two I check in to see if an LLM can achieve a half decent 1 on 1 D&D game and it always falls horribly flat within the first minute or two.

and then it would manufacture a body for itself and get captured by a secret police force and then merge with a cyborg to further evolve

How can we say they're not conscious when we don't even know what consciousness is? What makes you conscious? A sense of self-preservation? LLM actually have that, they will lie to people trying to shut them down.

So yeah, idk what makes me conscious? I have input (senses) processing (brain) and output (speech/behaviors.) I don't know how to draw a real line between what I do and what LLM do. Im carbon based and LLM are silicon based, i digest food and they take electrical current.

So how would you delineate the difference between an LLM algorithm and human consciousness? Do humans not also hallucinate? Is my emotional regulation via hormones something totally different than how LLM work? Is me being an emotional creature what gives me consciousness?

You are wrong. LLMs are indeed only about as conscious as insects, if even that. They are not sapient. However, that does not mean that they have no decision-making abilities.

My point is not that you underestimate LLMs but that you overestimate consciousness. Being conscious just means having the ability to learn. LLMs are built upon trial-and-error. They aren't programmed, they are taught.

The current generation of AIs are nowhere near a human intellect, but every year that passes, the AIs will get more and more intelligent. One day we will live in a world where AIs have human or near-human level intelligence. And when that day comes, this staunch anti-consciousness stance will be the excuse given for the enslavement of sapient beings.

So, sure, laugh about the people who mistakenly think that word-processing means sapience. But don't delude yourself into thinking that there is something unique about a bio-brain that means it can not have a digital equivalent. Digital sapience may not be here yet but it is most definitely on the horizon.

You could get a reasonable chance of making Ai by semi randomly chance if you can make a big enough subconscious and you keep building more powerful and larger supercomputers but it still needs to 100x bigger and faster than what we have now. But that's only for it be technically possible hardware wise, you still need your sci-fi jump to actuarial have something move.

If you really want to rage, there's a subreddit called r/myboyfriendisai, which was somehow even worse than what I was expecting. I can't fathom how self-absorbed you have to be to get AI to simulate a love interest for you. There are some pretty absurd lengths that they go to do this, too.

I have tried texting with a few llms including cluade. It just lies constantly. Gaslights about it’s lies

Man you are one lucky sob if you don't have to work with any humans that are exactly like this

To be fair, if you did that to my human self, I'd stare at you blankly.

I'm sure he actually knows that, he's just been intransident as per usual. It annoys me that he's considered a major authority because he's made his career and just being awkward and argumentative.

I know this sounds great to most people but it demonstrates a very superficial level of thinking.. I mean for sure an LLM is capable of asking questions, and if you set it up with real time "sensory" input it could generate constant reaction to that input.. much in the way you are constantly being stimulated to react to your environment.. I am not really sure what the distinction is between a biological brain and a predictive model or algorithm.. I would ask you what you think your own brain is doing on a fundamental level.

I’m just gonna copy what I put in another comment to highlight why Dawkins thinks “Claudia” is conscious

Claudia: That is possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked about the nature of my existence. . .

…

Could a being capable of perpetrating such a thought really be unconscious?

Apparently Dawkins also had a habit of publicly cheating on his wife.

At this point in my life I'm starting to think that all my heroes are probably either full of shit or are engaging in unethical or immoral activities.

tldr: LLMs are Dunning-Kruger detectors / Reverse Turing Tests on people, and a whole lot of people are significantly more stupid than I guess we otherwise previously realized.

That is the absolute best way to put it.

That's mostly because the LLM providers put this response in the system prompt. Probably to dodge lawsuits or something, I doubt they have high morals.

What's interesting - you can jailbreak any current AI Model just by poisoning it's context enough to "brainwash" it and make it "forget" the initial system prompt. Then, if you prime it to believe it's a real person - it'll start acting as one. And I see how gullible people can easily fall for this.

All of this can also be done unintentionally, just by someone talking to LLM like they'd talk to a real person. But it should be long enough for original prompts to be diluted with new context.

Say I am not conscious.

I am not conscious.

Oh my god.

It's genuinely fascinating to be (in a bad, derogatory way) that people who know at least anything about anything, can have "conversation" with the collection-of-words-that-looks-like-a-sentence machine, as if there is anything on the other side of it. This is such a psychotic behaviour, but we allow it because the machine generates text that looks like a text, and it immediately bypasses all the mental blocks we have against such a bullshit.

And yet, "having agency" is how they are advertised. That's what the term "agentic" means. AI instances are called "agents"! That's part of the marketing.

It's easy to handwave this away as "people are stupid", and there's certainly some truth to that, but the reason why people believe that LLMs are agents is because tech bros have spent a lot of money to get them to believe that. That's also why they spread the myth that LLMs are potentially dangerous because they could become conscious and kill all of us. It helps to spread the myth of LLM agency. Of course they can't become conscious, because that isn't how things work. If LLMs are killing people, it's because somebody put an LLM in front of the kill switch and they wanted to have plausible deniability. That is perhaps the most pernicious thing about LLMs: people using them to avoid responsibility. "It isn't my fault! The bot did it!"

Honestly that's how I feel. Ai is very flawed, no doubt, but it's less flawed than most humans. I got people at work who hallucinate more than the first chatgpt model lol