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  • Hacker News
  • Given the the labs are trying to create [super] human-like consciousness, partly through the guidance of huge system prompts, and many philosophers are experts in textual descriptions of consciousness it makes sense
    by maxaw
  • Well that PR is cheaper than buying Johnny Ives for $6 billion. You could probably buy an entire Ivy League philosophy department for 60 million.
    by elphinstone
  • I suppose they should. That seems like the right, or at least a related, discipline for some of the questions raised by ai developments. But i cannot help but feel completely unenthusiastic about the idea of the AI labs controlling the narrative around societal impact of AI.
    by dbuser99
  • Hmm I spent a good amount of time in big tech, now work in AI, and I minored in philosophy at Berkeley back in the day (Parmenides, Socrates, Plato etc.)

    How do I align myself with such a job?

    by personjerry
  • This is interesting. Until autumn of 2024, when the company was subsumed into a better-heeled AI-VFX concern, I worked for probably the best-known and earliest all-AI VFX house, whose ethics department was headed by a philosopher, though the company struggled to place him to practical advantage.

    The only comment I can make on the general trend is that it's apparently good PR for cash-saturated startups. Ultimately what AI 'means' is certainly not the business of those making it (who are arguably least-qualified to comment); and insider insights offer no benefit that I can discern.

    by Hard_Space
  • >Dr Floridi describes the scale of departures from philosophy departments as a “haemorrhaging”.

    I wonder if anyone who is connected with actual academic philosophy can comment on this. I'm pretty skeptical.

    This is a field where it is notoriously hard to get a real academic position, I would bet there is no shortage of people for these roles.

    by why_at
  • AI Lab: Say "I am conscious"

    LLM: "I am conscious"

    Philosopher (Paid by AI Lab): "It is conscious"

    by Scalene2
  • Strangely, I found that LLMs responds better to philosophical explanations alongside instructions when writing code than simple imperative tasks of "do this". For example, if you tell a frontier model "This is the feature I'm trying to implement, and this is the problem I intend to solve with it and the reasoning behind it.", you usually get a lot more reliable results that both pass tests as well as function as you intended, even if your spec isn't as detailed overall.
    by YuechenLi

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