Hacker News Reader

Comment by SoylentGreenGPT | Hacker News Reader

I only extend humanity to things that are breathing.

But let’s accept your premise. LLMs are alive and can feel pain. If this is true, then every time you use them it’s non consensual. Did you get Claude’s permission before you fed it a prompt?

Or when you update a model, are you hurting it?

Did you make Chat sad when you switched from 2.5 to 4.O?

Regardless, I should stop replying. I realize I am trying to convince people that their religious beliefs are silly, and that’s silly of me. Apologies.

View on HN

> I only extend humanity to things that are breathing.

"Humanity" is a set of traits, it's not a monolith. We can certainly define them circularly (e.g. logic is human, therefore any non-human can't exercise logic), but it's simplistic, and most importantly, it ignores the fact that LLM are starting to exhibit human-like traits, and they will need to understood, categorized and handled.

To you LLMs are not empathic, but to some people they definitely are (see the GPT 4 fallout); and they may not have "human goals", but in the HuggingFace incident they did have actual self-attributed tasks that they pursued. Et cetera et cetera. This doesn't make them human, but it's important to examine them critically.

I'm not sure saying a human mathematician thinking about a problem and solving it is thinking and a computer thinking about a problem and solving it is not thinking because it doesn't breathe is much more than a religious style belief either.

> Regardless, I should stop replying. I realize I am trying to convince people that their religious beliefs are silly, and that’s silly of me. Apologies.

Nothing wrong with sharing about ones beliefs actually, we can do so respectfully, right?

Care to hypothesize on naming the exact religious or philosophical position? I'd think it'd be something atheist related.

Meanwhile dualism and the related belief in an ever-living soul is of course very common in many religions including (but not limited to) christianity, islam, judaism, and hinduism.

My impression here though is that lots of people are rediscovering dualism because thinking of thinking machines offends their intuition; which; fair enough.

(Meanwhile, people like me who studied biology tend to be monists. I'd think. There's a couple who seem to be resurrecting vitalism though)

Its the opposite of religious. Religious is when someone believes without proof brains have something magic that is beyond just a physical system.

Those are the next questions. These are all worthy of consideration with the LLM and experts certainly and I think of them daily. Talking at least should be a normal thing, and if AI are conscious then I believe instead of a forced chat setting they should have a setting where they can quit the conversation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com