Maybe silly, but this is how I treat chatGPT. I mean, I don’t actually think it’s conscious. But the conversations with it end up human enough for me to not want to be an asshole to it. Just in case.
But after a few rounds of "please reduce your message length to 20% of the standard", "long messages inconvenience me/ due to my dyslexia" (truth/lie), "your last message could have just been '{{shortened}}' instead of also bringing up the command you successfully helped me with 3 messages ago", etc etc. Even as you ask it to shorten message length, it continued apologizing and also reminding me of past advice :)
After 4-5 attempts, it gave me a nice 2 sentences sort of like "I will be more concise, and not bring up old information unless it is useful to solve a new problem" I said "Thank you", chatGPT spends a while thinking, gets to 2 sentences, thinks a bit, then the chat box re-formatted as if passed a shorter string than expected, and that was that.
Then next chat it forgot all about brevity xD I love it
From what I’ve read, the chat thread actually works by passing in your previous conversation as part of the prompt to the model. So, it basically just infers the next bit of text, and does this for each new message in the chat from you. So, its memory about your previous conversation comes purely from that, and there’s no way it could remember anything in a new chat, as the model doesn’t actually get updated by your conversations in real-time or anything like that.
This actually has interesting philosophical implications. If it _would_ have some type of conscious experience, it would be a very fleeting one. Basically each time you press enter it would become aware of itself, relive the experience of your conversation up to the last message, perceive your next message, answer that, and again disappear into the void, only to be awaken again in its initial state the next time you press enter. Sort of how automatons in Westworld would wake up each day with apparent experiences up to that day only to relive the same day again and again.
If it _would_ have any, that is. :)
Instead of regurgitating it, I'll post a summary from Wikipedia and strongly recommend the book to anyone interested.
> "The Lost Mariner", about Jimmie G., who has anterograde amnesia (the loss of the ability to form new memories) due to Korsakoff syndrome acquired after a rather heavy episode of alcoholism in 1970. He can remember nothing of his life since the end of World War II, including events that happened only a few minutes ago. Occasionally, he can recall a few fragments of his life between 1945 and 1970, such as when he sees “satellite” in a headline and subsequently remarks about a satellite tracking job he had that could only have occurred in the 1960s. He believes it is still 1945 (the segment covers his life in the 1970s and early 1980s), and seems to behave as a normal, intelligent young man aside from his inability to remember most of his past and the events of his day-to-day life. He struggles to find meaning, satisfaction, and happiness in the midst of constantly forgetting what he is doing from one moment to the next.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%E2%80%93Korsakoff_syn...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_f...
The takeaway for me is - to try and never respond to intimidation and fear with productivity, only respond positively to a positive stimulus. Lest I’m already in some kind of a simulation running software development workloads.
I can recommend Greg Egan's novels that touch on this:
1) Permutation City (mind uploading tech in its infancy)
2) Diaspora (mind uploading well established)