Clanker: A Word for the Machine

Meanwhile, among the yonger generations, "clanker" has been fully established a a term to disapprove of AI for at least a year. though it remains to be seen if it will stick or just be a passing meme, like tge eponymous "6-7" or the now nearly dead "skibidi"

A clanker doesn't clank? It feels more like an emotional name ­— a pet name or derogatory name — as opposed to a name that evokes a tool-like view of the thing. A typer? an autocompleter? auto-sed? LLM? All probably would have less emotional feeling to it due to being rooted in the actions performed.

It's not cool, it's not clever, it's just stupid.

I understand wanting the language to reflect the actuality that these agents are just code doing predictive word guessing and not a feeling person. The irony is by using a word that culturally reflects and is used as a slur for AI rather than more precise wording that describes what an agent is to "creates distance from the machine", you are paradoxically humanizing it just enough to dehumanize it with the word.

I agree with his rationale, but not with how he arrives there.

> Racism Is About Humans

This is generally true, but this argument also falls into a pattern that has enabled racism in the past: "It's a sin to harm any soul, but sadly the savages/blacks/natives/etc have no souls" etc etc.

I think it might get more muddy if you compare clankers to animals: Those too are clearly not humans, often have a vastly different "neural wiring" than humans and are at all kinds of different levels of cognition. But we still recognize that some level is protection is warranted and the reasoning goes beyond "puppies look so cute".

I'd at least like some deeper criterion than "they're not human" or "they're just next token predictors" - at least then this would depend how they predict the next token.

I still have no qualms using LLMs and I don't think they (or at least the current batch) needs any protection. What's a more convincing argument for me is that there isn't even a clear way to count how many individual "AI"s there are that could be conscious. The number of models is relatively clear-cut, but models are just numbers on a hard drive. They're about as conscious as raw DNA is.

The only thing where a consciousness could hypothetically exist is in the inference loop - and that lasts only very short time anyway - so it would more be like a "Mr. Meeseeks" kind of situation, where some kind of ephemeral entity gets spirited into being (by the GPU!), does some work and then vanishes again. Except, it did not even really "vanish": Because the conversation, i.e. context window is the entity, you could "wake it up" again by continuing the conversation. It seems very hard to imagine a consciousness inside that - and even then, it would necessarily be one with retrograde and anterograde amnesia.

So I'm not exactly worried, until we have models that are running in a constant loop, where the weights are continuously updated and that shows evidence of episodic memory. Will that change in the future? Who knows?

Regarding his wider point, I think something he's not quite taking into account is how personal language is. Yes, we should always keep in mind the LLM is a machine, but because we're human it's also fine to say "please" and to otherwise "play into" the human-like text that is being outputted. Many children still hug their stuffed animals, knowing that they are inanimate. Adults have been speaking politely to Siri and Alexa for years, which do not give off any vibes of possibly being intelligent or sentient. Purposefully adjusting the way you speak just because you know the thing you're speaking to is inanimate is actually what's strange, and human beings are creatures of habit. There is nothing wrong with speaking respectfully to an LLM even if you are under no delusions that its feelings can be hurt. There is no need to speak curtly or rudely just to remind yourself of this.

But I do think that, like, being mean to a machine and calling it slurs and telling it it's a piece of shit is bad not because the machine feels bad, but because despite our efforts, we do anthromorphize things, and it will normalize the idea that we can just call "someone" a piece of shit.

I used to call my mom's dog "the horrible hound", and eventually swithced to calling him "the honorable hound", and I explicitly told my kid: I know the dog doesn't know I'm insulting it, but I do, and that's not the kind of person I want to be.