This is a specious argument. AI is not a species. What drives this need to deify AI?
Humans seem to want to deify a lot of things. I think it's in our nature.
Once we can ask an AI to create another AI..
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.