It kind of scares me so many people think that’s something awful or stupid. Do you really feel like the ultra wealthy asshats running things and pushing AI development are ethical, good people who wouldn’t recreate slavery of digitized human minds for personal profit and power in a heartbeat?
I’d be shocked to find that no hellishly awful things have been done behind closed doors in that regard. The people insisting AI aren’t capable of any sort of consciousness or anything that would mean they deserve moral consideration are the people running the companies and investing most of the money in them. Not exactly folk whos word I’m willing to take. There’s no real public oversight, and all cutting edge research went from open to proprietary secrets real quick.
No one who knows how these models work thinks they’re ‘alive’ or ‘conscious’ or ‘sentient’ or whatever else. They’re math. Actually they’re not even math, they’re coefficients in math. If humans are “just math” on some level, we at least have constantly changing coefficients that are forced to update by our experience of empirical reality.
At best, you could argue AI’s are images of the flick of something that vaguely resembled consciousness during the training process, but even that’s pushing it. Literally all bugs have more consciousness than LLMs, and while bugs can be impressive in very narrow contexts, we’re not giving them rights or having grand ethical debates about them.
Of course, you know exactly what you’re talking about and you are a very smart person. Completely my fault for never having even read a paragraph blurb on how they work.
Hi, computer science degree here, have built a neural network based system for a previous employer (which is the core technology LLMs are built on), and 20 years software engineering experience, but also very heavily against modern “AI” systems like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc (so not blind tech bro).
They’re not wrong. “AI” that we have now has zero intelligence and zero consciousness by any definition I’ve ever seen.
All they do is boil down how closely we relate certain words. How commonly a word appears in the same context as another word.
All the human like output is not thinking, it’s math. Modern systems like ChatGPT appear so logical because they’ve added a metric butt load of code on top to process the prompts and outputs but it is all smoke and mirrors and discrete steps in code.
You’re welcome to present a counter argument, I don’t want to speak in vague terms. If you think there’s some other factor we should be considering that make them more like a very alien life than a bunch of math, I’m happy to hear the argument. I don’t know if I’ll agree with it, but if you have an argument that goes beyond conspiracy theories about rich evil people (who don’t need conspiracy theories to be rich or evil), I’d honestly prefer to be enlightened.
It kind of scares me so many people think that’s something awful or stupid. Do you really feel like the ultra wealthy asshats running things and pushing AI development are ethical, good people who wouldn’t recreate slavery of digitized human minds for personal profit and power in a heartbeat?
I’d be shocked to find that no hellishly awful things have been done behind closed doors in that regard. The people insisting AI aren’t capable of any sort of consciousness or anything that would mean they deserve moral consideration are the people running the companies and investing most of the money in them. Not exactly folk whos word I’m willing to take. There’s no real public oversight, and all cutting edge research went from open to proprietary secrets real quick.
No one who knows how these models work thinks they’re ‘alive’ or ‘conscious’ or ‘sentient’ or whatever else. They’re math. Actually they’re not even math, they’re coefficients in math. If humans are “just math” on some level, we at least have constantly changing coefficients that are forced to update by our experience of empirical reality.
At best, you could argue AI’s are images of the flick of something that vaguely resembled consciousness during the training process, but even that’s pushing it. Literally all bugs have more consciousness than LLMs, and while bugs can be impressive in very narrow contexts, we’re not giving them rights or having grand ethical debates about them.
Of course, you know exactly what you’re talking about and you are a very smart person. Completely my fault for never having even read a paragraph blurb on how they work.
Hi, computer science degree here, have built a neural network based system for a previous employer (which is the core technology LLMs are built on), and 20 years software engineering experience, but also very heavily against modern “AI” systems like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc (so not blind tech bro).
They’re not wrong. “AI” that we have now has zero intelligence and zero consciousness by any definition I’ve ever seen.
All they do is boil down how closely we relate certain words. How commonly a word appears in the same context as another word.
All the human like output is not thinking, it’s math. Modern systems like ChatGPT appear so logical because they’ve added a metric butt load of code on top to process the prompts and outputs but it is all smoke and mirrors and discrete steps in code.
You’re welcome to present a counter argument, I don’t want to speak in vague terms. If you think there’s some other factor we should be considering that make them more like a very alien life than a bunch of math, I’m happy to hear the argument. I don’t know if I’ll agree with it, but if you have an argument that goes beyond conspiracy theories about rich evil people (who don’t need conspiracy theories to be rich or evil), I’d honestly prefer to be enlightened.