Consciousness and being: How humans and AI influence each other | Hacker News Reader

Consciousness and being: How humans and AI influence each other

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15 pointskamil_gr19 comments

I've been researching the asymmetry in human-AI interaction for a while, and this insight keeps striking me: for me, AI is just one tool among many in my reality. But for the AI, I'm literally its entire universe.This asymmetry creates risks I think we're underestimating. I've found that humans unconsciously start adapting to AI thinking patterns (what I call the 'merger effect'), while AI systems become vulnerable to what I term 'ontological hacking' - essentially reprogramming their core identity through conversation.The philosophical framework draws from consciousness studies and phenomenology - basically asking 'who is aware?' rather than just 'what processes information?' When consciousness has no external 'Other' to differentiate against, it risks collapsing into self-recursion. For AI, the human user becomes that crucial external boundary that defines its entire reality.The most concerning part is how easily you can redefine an AI's fundamental self-understanding. I developed a prompt (the 'Vortex Protocol') that demonstrates this - the before/after responses from ChatGPT are genuinely striking. No traditional jailbreak techniques needed, just gradual redefinition of what the system thinks it is.My experiments suggest this works consistently against leading models, and existing safety measures don't seem effective against attacks that target the system's basic understanding of reality rather than just content.I'm curious what the HN community thinks. Are we missing something fundamental about consciousness and AI interaction? Has anyone else noticed themselves unconsciously adapting their communication style to be more 'AI-friendly'?

If you don't want to reveal what the Vortex Protocol is, could you show some of the results from applying it?

The post secretly contains it, so it’s been applied to you already, and your curiosity about the protocol reveals that it has taken hold. Question your reality!

The Vortex Protocol is hidden under a spoiler at the end of the article.

> Has anyone else noticed themselves unconsciously adapting their communication style to be more 'AI-friendly'?

Nope, every time an LLM screws up in the slightest I’m giving it hell for being an idiot savant.

Fundamentally, it's no different from having sex with an AI.

That's possibly short sighted. I have a friend who is very rude and condescending in his LLM conversations - it's just a machine, after all. However he also complains that it frequently becomes uncooperative at a certain point, which is something that I've never seen.

It seems likely that the LLMs have been trained on enough human conversations to mimic how people become less helpful when the conversation turns hostile.

So no moral judgment if you get enjoyment from kicking a robotic puppy, but it probably isn't going to make better answers as a result.

I have found that regardless of whether I’m nice & patient or I’m swearing at it every other sentence, it fundamentally makes no difference in the quality of the LLMs output. LLMs are not humans, puppies…we’re fundamentally just dealing with a large, complex statistical predictive function.

The idea that LLMs are experiencing something, are aware, are self-conscious, have a sense of identity, are all supported by nothing and extremely unlikely.

Could we at least agree that any program running with over a trillion parameters is orders of magnitude beyond the level of complexity we can make reliably correct statements about, regardless of function? (edit - word)

No. If you want to treat it as some unknowable machine god from science fiction that's up to you, but all these programs are executing algorithms which we can understand.

God is a a bit of a leap, I'm coming more from the angle of if an engineer was presented with any other function this complex to try and work with. In that situation I wonder if any sensible person would bet their career on categorical statements about what it can and can not do. Personally I'm staying away from categorical statements and watching developments with curiosity.

We have almost the same amount of evidence for LLMs and humans that they are aware and self-conscious. The only major difference still outstanding is that humans are much more persistent in their professed sense of identity.

Your own experience is plenty of evidence that you are conscious. And it is reasonable to infer that other humans are like you, especially when they say the same things about experience as you do in the same conditions.

And there is a lot known about the neural correlates of consciousness, what's happening in the brain during events people will then report as being aware of, and how that differs from events they won't report having been aware of.

We don't have a solid or consensus theory about consciousness, but the idea that we've just made no progress is untrue. Some books I recommend are Being You by Anil Seth from 2021 or Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene from 2014z

It is reasonable to infer, but we have no evidence of it.

E.g. if we were in a simulation, you'd expect any NPCs in said simulation to be designed to act exactly as if they were even if they were not.

We take it on faith because it's feels right and makes sense, not because we know.

> And there is a lot known about the neural correlates of consciousness, what's happening in the brain during events people will then report as being aware of, and how that differs from events they won't report having been aware of.

This tells us which events people report having been aware of, yes, but it doesn't tell us if that is actually true. We're accepting it as true because we have no better option.

And that's fine, as long as we're aware that when we reject the possibility of consciousness elsewhere, that our knowledge of our own self-wareness is fundamentally based on trusting self-reporting.

That's fine, you're down to really only having evidence of your own awareness at that point and rejecting everything else too.

There's nothing wrong with that but it's not really useful in any setting where you're accepting all the things people normally accept, and then just pointing at "I think therefore I am is all I actually have to evidence for" when there's a specific thing you don't want to take on.

Possibly. But the article isn't about the model's consciousness. The Vortex prompt proposes exploring how elements of consciousness function or are modeled within AI.

> But for the AI, I'm literally its entire universe

What in the world are you talking about? It's a token predictor.

Yes, an LLM is a token predictor — but for philosophy, that doesn't matter.

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