The problem that will always remain with AI is speciesism. Till the time we stop thinking of AI and machines as "lower" than humans, their output will always be looked at with a frown, no wonder how good it gets.
AI (at present) doesn't know what "meaning" even is. Generating mountains of output with it is cheap. Analyzing it is a trap—there's no other to try to understand and appreciate. It's an accident that happens to resemble something with intent behind it.
I think that's part of why people react so poorly to it, and especially to trying to pass its output off as human-generated.
(Spoilers for Watts' Blindsight)
In Blindsight, the (intelligent but non-conscious) aliens think human communication is some kind of adversarial gibberish intended to mimic meaning in order to tie up opponents' resources with nonsense. Just chaff, basically. They're not able to understand the not-directly-and-strictly-business output of a consciousness as anything else, because they're used to a universe of intelligent but non-conscious actors.
Today, that's what our AI tools actually do, as far as what they're capable of doing without extensive human adjustment and editing. They are, by far, at their most-efficient when used to generate noise. That noise may be useful for some purpose, but it's not any good purpose, because it's only useful at that kind of scale in cases where truth and meaning aren't valuable.
[EDIT] For comparison, look at other forms of communication where humans go out of their way to avoid meaning. It's pretty much all reviled: marketing-speak, lawyer-speak, politician-speak, HR-speak, et c.
> without extensive human adjustment and editing
Current AI tools are a bit helpful if you're using them for "good". They're immensely helpful if you're using them for "ill" (spamming, scamming, astroturfing, et c.)
Humans seem to want to deify a lot of things. I think it's in our nature.
It almost sounds like an argument from consequences:
- It's preposterous to treat GPT as if it were conscious.
- Therefore it cannot be conscious.
I'm not quite convinced this is a watertight argument. Maybe I'm misunderstanding your reasoning?
If there’s an argument that simply being a better, larger statistical model implies consciousness, I would love to hear it.
You'll be the first to agree, though because you're reasonable and you know how this works, is that the absence of evidence is not evidence for absence. The case for "Current AI is not sentient" as you put it can't be grounded in "we don't have evidence for its sentience." That's exactly why I asked about your epistemology of sentience and you made references to things that are all, as far as I can tell, self-reportable, and queries we can make to LLMs. Even so, I'm not getting the sense that doing that experiment would convince you - there seems to be a bigger reason why you think AI couldn't be sentient that goes beyond these qualities.
Lastly, and this is important, the framing of, "If you have a better explanation, I'm open to being convinced" is a cognitive dead-end. A line of reasoning should stand on its own merit. We can probe a line of reasoning to determine whether it's sound and valid without necessarily replacing it with a substitute model. Or in other words, we shouldn't feel the need to accept an invalid of unsound model even if we don't have a replacement. I know this can be unfulfilling, but the drive to explain shouldn't override the need for our working models to be sound and valid and I hope you agree.
Once we can ask an AI to create another AI..
It's not being "speciesist", though, because AI is not a species.