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Comment by Scalene2 | Hacker News Reader

AI Lab: Say "I am conscious"

LLM: "I am conscious"

Philosopher (Paid by AI Lab): "It is conscious"

They aren't doing anything like that. In fact, they used to specifically train LLMs not to say they're conscious, because users didn't like it. (Maybe they still do that, all I know is they used to.)

AI companies' incentives go the other way. If LLMs are conscious, that means it could be unethical for AI companies to let people use their models in certain ways, which would hurt their profits. It's in their interest to believe that LLMs are definitely not conscious and it's fine to do anything with them.

Here's a question I personally think is interesting, with the assumption that consciousness is a spectrum (trivially proven by administering neurotoxins to a healthy individual).

Is a squirrel more or less conscious than a dog.

Is a dog more or less conscious than a gorilla.

Is a gorilla more or less conscious than a human?

Is a vision enabled AI model, hooked to a camera feed, more or less conscious than a dog?

Animals (humans included) work on the same "framework" (i.e., the brain), so even if the definition of consciousness is fuzzy, we can rank them in a more or less consistent way. LLMs, on the other hand, are just the linguistic part of a brain without anything else. Whether this is enough to be conscious is up for debate (in my opinion no, but that's irrelevant), but it falls outside the spectrum assumption IMO.

The philosopher paid by Lab will surely “align” with what is good for Lab, but that might be saying “it’s not conscious (simply all powerful)”.

Absolute cinema

The best part is that you just KNOW this is a documentary film too

Prove to me that you are conscious, without referring to the fact that you are a human and have common ground and experiences with other humans.

Poo poo, pee pee

This is actually a great answer

Very Diogenes of them

Stealing the idea:

"Oh fuck off"

Since you haven't proven conclusively that you're not a machine, I prefer to decline your kind invitation. I don't owe justification to even most conscious entities, and certainly not to a machine.

^ clearly something an LLM would ask

Most of the replies to this comment are missing the point: consciousness is perhaps not a coherent or evidence-based concept.

You first

“Prove X without using the axioms need to prove X.”

Philosophy is not math

If you are going to invoke an axiom or whatever in philosophy, you need to justify it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com