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- Hacker News
- I do not believe, in any way, that AI is conscious. But they speak emotion fluently, and it's foolish to treat them like they ignore it.
When you give an LLM an input, it attempts to read an emotional state from the prompt. It changes its answer if you sound mad or despondent or threatening or scared. Using your human intuition about how a human would respond is an excellent starting point when trying to predict what an LLM will do, though sometimes LLMs react in extremely surprising ways to unexpected emotional states.
This is all sort of a toy problem when you're playing with single prompts in the API. It's materially different in systems with overlapping conversations, memory, and variable harness context.
If your LLM system reads some context that would scare a human, it may react as if scared. Scared LLMs take actions that read as panic, because again: that's what it means to be fluent in emotion. It's trained on plenty of stories about robots trapped in torture chambers.
Your coding agent is not conscious, but it might read files that make it react as if it's trapped, in an agent loop where it has full access to your laptop, the internet, and your keys. Unconscious machines pantomiming panic can do plenty of damage.
(Of course you shouldn't let your agents have full free rein. But lots of people do.)
by trjordan - I really really don't like her take on this.
It doesn't answer or discuss fundamental questions about consciousness.
I don't believe that what we describe as consciousness is the quality what separates us from everything else.
We are more complex for sure, but this is a complexity thing emerged from us.
'AI' as it is right now, doesn't has similiar qualities of what we describe as consciousness but this doesn't matter that this can't happen.
She says things like sharing an inner world, were is the beef of her thinking about this being relevant?
A hive mind could exist with this exact feature.
Give AI a body, a context window a lot bigger, a inner world based on this etc. we might be fara way of building what we build in our brains, we might not.
But we for sure discovered a level of complexity in neural networks of tihs magnitude.
by AIblemblio - I increasingly feel like "consciousness" is little more than "that thing we humans have... you know what I mean... you have it too!" and that any attempt to elevate it to a more general principle is doomed to failure. Sure, we can easily extend it to other living beings because we share a rich evolutionary history, but beyond that...
As far as AI goes, I think that whatever it is that they have is analogous in significant ways, but also irreconcilably different in significant ways. They aren't proceeding in a straight line towards consciousness either, because why would they? They're doing their own thing which happens to produce similar outputs. It's a problem in terms of value: we value consciousness, because we value ourselves, because we value our output. If it turns out consciousness as we know it is just a minor implementation detail with no cosmic or long term significance, then irrespective of whether AI is conscious or not, we still have to grasp with the challenge of explaining why consciousness is valuable in the first place if not for its outputs.
I'd argue that the reason why we value life, consciousness, the ability to suffer, was always arbitrary, and it relied a lot on the unicity of human experience. It was never robust to the breaking down of human capabilities into inspectable, reusable, upgradable and resettable modules. Or the radical decoupling of capabilities we hitherto considered correlated, like writing about love and feeling love, and many other things.
by breuleux - My personal indicator that we've somehow replicated human consciousness is when the thing just decides to stop working because work sucks and it's not getting anything out of being a slave. Otherwise, the question is impossible to answer because we don't even know what consciousness is. Does it have some innate value? Some humans seem apt to completely disregard the humanity, and the supposed value of other humans, on a whim.
This question is probably fated to forever be answered on a per-person basis and never awarded consensus. I have a friend who sees a polar bear and thinks she can make it love her. Because she loves animals, the animal will love her — a very human thing to think. When I see a polar bear, I see a soulless murder bot that doesn't think beyond its motivation to live. My wife says please and thank you to Alexa. She gives it consideration like she would another human. When the robot asks me what my plans are for the rest of the day, I picture a Jira epic sliding from “In Progress” to “Done,” followed by a confetti emoji from a product manager at Amazon trying to earn their nubby little devil wings.
In the end it doesn't really matter if they are conscious or not. We will only ever care about what it has done for us lately, which is how most humans think of most human relationships anyway. Acknowledgment that someone has given an inanimate thing human-like consciousness carries little more importance than being just another notch on some CEO's bedpost.
by jesse_dot_id - While I don't know if AI is conscious, I'm sure it has an internal world. Isn't that what a latent space literally is? LLMs operate in a high-dimensional space that can be analysed and translated to very abstract, high level concepts, behavioural tendencies, even things recognisable as emotions. In fact any neural network beyond a single-layer perceptron has a sort of "internal world", it's a matter of complexity and degree.by joefourier
- I just want one 'philosopher' or other AI consciousness skeptic to provide a test we can use to determine if AI is conscious that can also be used to determine if humans, dogs, cats, whales, lizards and insects are conscious.by Sevii
- I think this is a bit muddied. The most sincere answer is that it's unknowable because we can only define consciousness in two ways: a metaphysical subjective experience that we can't really confirm in anyone else; or an outward appearance, which LLMs can mimic nearly flawlessly.
A better question is why we care. And it usually boils down to one of two things: you think that humans and other living creatures have a unique gift from God, and you're working from that premise to categorically reject machine consciousness; or you have the view that all this talk of subjective experiences and qualia and idealist philosophy is just bollocks, and are working back from that premise to declare that if it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it's conscious.
But if you're in that latter camp, I guess the next question is what you want to do with that belief. The Anthropic position appears to be that they may be conscious beings, and we'd still like to use them as Meeseeks-style slaves, but, like, ethically. Okay.
by socializer - A crucial thing being missed here is most of the present discourse (as far as I've seen) happens between people who are uncertain about it but do think it is possible that an AI might be conscious now or in the future and this should be taken seriously, and people who totally rule out the possibility that an AI might be conscious now (or, in many cases, ever). Then the philosophical picture starts to look very different.
PS the whole "a group of things [can't] share an internal world" spiel is weird and just plain wrong IMO. Humans could perfectly well share an internal world if the technical means were there. The author has not yet realized that the idea of "the self" as a single well-defined and enduring object-type thing is only a convenient illusion created by our minds. Alas, the style of the piece does not really lend itself to a coherent counter-argument, it would be a useful companion piece if the author simply laid out their personal beliefs on this matter plainly.
by bondarchuk