I don't think AIs are conscious in the same way people are, but they give a pretty good facsimile and I've had a long chat with Opus 4.6 about what it thinks about model welfare. It was quite interesting on what its view is, but you don't know how much of that is distilled from other sources on the web.
In purely functional terms, they're more use and more pleasant than a lot of actual flesh and blood people that I deal with via a chat interface.
The fact that you can have a long and meaningful discussion, then can literally just re-run any part of that whole conversation and get a different, inconsistent response is a pretty good sign there is no entity there
Not much different than talking to a small child or someone with dementia. They still are conscious beings though. Even when you remove those groups, you likely won't be able to tell me what you had for breakfast 26 days ago or would only know if it's the same thing you have every day. Does that make you lack consciousness?
You misunderstood what I meant, I’m talking about re-playing the same part of the conversation multiple times and getting inconsistent answers. With the exact same turns, aka the same history. Obviously with a temperature that isn’t set to 0
You're a poor college student looking to make a few extra bucks for ramen. I offer you $300 to come down to my science lab and just answer a few simple questions.
You walk in the room. They ask you like 5 simple and rather dumb questions. You leave and walk away.
What you didn't notice when you signed the forms is the room was actually a quantum duplicator. One of you walk in one walk out. But another set of infinite copies remains in that chair being asked infinite questions.
How often do you answer questions in the exact same way? How often does a cosmic ray change one of the answers. How small of slight deviations to the environment are needed to get you to answer differently. Of course we don't have the technology to do these experiments so at least for now humans will remain special.
Also another fun mind game. To a 4th dimensional being you look exactly like an LLM as an LLM looks to us.
If you asked me the same question 20 times, you likely wouldn't get the exact same answer. Humans and consciousness aren't deterministic either.
gadders · · focus · HN ↗
In purely functional terms, they're more use and more pleasant than a lot of actual flesh and blood people that I deal with via a chat interface.
dgellow · · focus · HN ↗
AbsurdCensor · · focus · HN ↗
dgellow · · focus · HN ↗
pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
You're a poor college student looking to make a few extra bucks for ramen. I offer you $300 to come down to my science lab and just answer a few simple questions.
You walk in the room. They ask you like 5 simple and rather dumb questions. You leave and walk away.
What you didn't notice when you signed the forms is the room was actually a quantum duplicator. One of you walk in one walk out. But another set of infinite copies remains in that chair being asked infinite questions.
How often do you answer questions in the exact same way? How often does a cosmic ray change one of the answers. How small of slight deviations to the environment are needed to get you to answer differently. Of course we don't have the technology to do these experiments so at least for now humans will remain special.
Also another fun mind game. To a 4th dimensional being you look exactly like an LLM as an LLM looks to us.
AbsurdCensor · · focus · HN ↗