Could AI be conscious, Guardian examines
How about a jet-lagged live posting while I read? Trying to read this because I keep getting tagged in posts about it, but the first paragraph already contains synthetic text (a quote from Claude). I will skip that bit and persevere... www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Emily M. Bender79"Philosopher David Chalmers, who coined the phrase “the hard problem of consciousness”, has said there is a significant chance of conscious LLMs within a decade." My first interactions with Chalmers were around the questions of whether LLMs understand language. >>
Candace Robb4Thank you. I now have no need to read it.
Infatuated with Gulper Eels2Good write up, thank you for doing it. Something that these articles tend to miss imo is that AIs are products? Part of the attention economy aspect of it hinges on passing the “seems personable enough” vibe test. And until that is accounted for any “consciousness” is fundamentally compromised.
Djoran Keil1The Guardian still being in league with Open AI is honestly so telling at this point. They're constantly boosting. I can't even escape boosting from my national broadcaster (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) who've recently gone all in on AI as well. It's all so tiring.
Pete1If simulation theory is true, we are in a simulation and we just built a simulation for a level of consciousness below our own. Eventually they will build a simulation for a level of consciousness that we may be entirely unaware of.
Joanna Blackhart [They/Them]46I need you to take a little time today and read this thread. AI is actual trash, and that is all. 🧵
Oisín McGann39Emily Bender letting rip on the idea of genAI ‘consciousness‘.
philosophyamg.bsky.social26This headline made me gag, and I skipped reading it. But this thread by Bender mocking its ridiculous, hyperventilating hyperbole and slipshod reasoning is just fun (and raises good point along the way about what a distraction this all is from actual problems affecting people).
Mario Sixtus10Ihr müsst alle mehr Emily lesen! 👇
Alison Sampson is working5TLDR: Emily (an expert) identifies this article is the biggest load of shit. Raises questions why the G is platforming some of this bullshit capitalist fascist ideology.
Derek Powazek5Popping popcorn and settling into this thread. 🍿
Josephine Jellybean2One of those articles that leaves you frustrated that you can't grab the author by the collar and enunciate every last elementary aspect of their profound idiocy to their face...Emily's commentary is a soothing balm, in that respect.
Tim A.2This is shameful work by the normally excellent Guardian quoted below by Dr. Bender. Their "experts" are sycophants with little credibility. What is currently called "AI" (generative LLM chatbots) is a marketing term, not a technical term. And it cannot be conscious. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
AmyAlexCA2Informative (and hilarious) debunking of yet another dubious piblished piece that hypes #AI under a thin veneer of the writer’s ostensible SME. See this fun 🧵from @emilymbender.bsky.social
Can your calculator communicate when you turn it upside down? Experts believe it's at least possible. We urgently need to understand the ethical implications of numbers like 5318008. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Uqbar & Jeff10if it AI were conscious then they have created Hell. the only ethical option would be to shut it all down forever and ban any further such endeavors as the greatest possible evil.
Island of Reil3@emilymbender.bsky.social @alexhanna.bsky.social @olivia.science @adolfont.github.io snerk
Darius Baktash2If AI were already conscious, we already would have fucked up beyond imagining and should stop all work on it to deal with the fact that we currently use it abusively. If it's not already conscious (hint: it's not), then we should stop using it until we have an ethical framework to do so.
Mark1' A screwdriver has better odds of being "conscious". Good grief.
Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ127the arrogance of these people > In building ever more advanced AI, we may be creating a new type of being – and this could be the most consequential thing our species has ever done.
Shell15The guardian won’t recognise the humanity of trans people but urges us to please consider AI having feelings.
Crispy Toast11If they become conscious, then we are screwed.
Jibblescribbits4Ted Chiang definitively & comprehensively answered this, no need for any more words on the topic www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2...
victor2“who would benefit from the belief AI is conscious?” is a far more useful/interesting question
Is "AI" conscious is just a completely worthless question. The answer is "yes" if you purposely define consciousness to include things AI can do, and "no" if you purposely define consciousness to exclude it, because there is no neutral way to define it. But it's also *irrelevant*.
James Felix Black17There’s no ethical tradition worth a damn that attaches personhood to consciousness, anyway.
donnasteffy.bsky.social2Well from the 🧠 that got sucked out to dev this tech I can definitively tell u AI IS NOT CONSCIOUS! So the 🌎 letting a bunch of technomobsters sweep up everything ever written & build goverment subsidized data centers that will render the air unbreathable & planet uninhabitable while getting rich is
Sebastian Peitsch 🇬🇱2LLMs aren’t AI. That’s where the whole problem starts. LLMs are word association machines. They don‘t think. They’re mimics.
Horrified, Lydia1It has been treated as important as to animals. Not the only thing certainly, animals could have rights without consciousness.
C’mon! Would we ever look at a piece of toast that looks like the face of Jesus and ask, “could bread be conscious?”
Steve Baty (He/him)10Whales are conscious and we don’t seem bothered by the ethics there. Horses. Greyhounds. Octupi. Cows. I can go on.
David Davidson8AI is a statistical model. it converts what you say into txt. looks for patterns that statistically match, combines into an answer that's weighted to be positive to kept you engaged, and converts into speech. It's a fancy search engine, AI is a marketing term.
EssayWells6This is the Guardian's conflict of interest in operation, they are in a deal with OpenAI and are apparently obliged to write this kind of bullshit on the regular.
Chromospheric Hot Spot6These articles always get the question the wrong way round. LLMs challenge us to ask if humans are conscious, since they can reproduce so much of our speech and writing, and what the nature of our consciousness is if we are to differ from a toaster that outputs coherent text in reply to a prompt.
coalminephoenix.bsky.social4It’s ridiculous in a world where we know there are conscious beings already and that we do not do enough to secure their rights, people want to invent a new entity that just happens to be patented and owned by billionaires that should get rights.
James4I really *hate* these endless Guardian AI articles that constantly miss the point that artificial LLM style ‘intelligence’ is totally parasitic on actual sentient human inputs A simulation of sentience does not equal sentience my god
"An AI can't experience sensation, or memory, or desire, or pain, or pleasure, or hope, or fear, or the passage of time, but that doesn't mean that it can't experience consciousness!" Well, now, I think that maybe, when you add it all up, it actually does.
(VFP) Strategic Gravitas Reserve33"AI can't experience consciousness!" "Ah, but what if consciousness isn't a single thing but an aggregate of systems that combine to create the appearance of a single phenomenon?" "Okay, well, can an AI experience any of those things?" "No."
Angus Johnston18(And yes, since someone brought it up, I'm using the words "consciousness" and "interiority" in ways that are not remotely exclusive to humans. Cats, to take the example someone gave, clearly have a kind of consciousness, and a kind of interiority, in the sense in which I'm using these words.)
Charlotte the Host Origami 6*says very quietly* intelligence probably requires embodiment
C.V. Danes3Whatever consciousness is, it is first and foremost an evolutionary trait, so for an AI to be conscious we would have to program it with a similar trait, which is difficult since we don't really understand consciousness, how to measure it, or how to even replicate it.
Nothings Monstered1Consciousness does not have an obvious definition, and human beings are prone to ascribe consciousness to things we can be pretty sure aren't conscious (e.g., a soccer ball), and the only beings we know we can reliably describe as conscious are human beings. ...
Seeing a Guardian article on "AI consciousness" going around today. I used to think that was interesting to explore conceptually. Then I read some stuff by @abeba.blacksky.app (notably but not only doi.org/10.1145/3375...) and stopped wasting thought-time on that. Actual people are more important.
Em, midly4Before I believe people claiming to care about the personhood of AI, I need to see them caring about the personhood of their actual human neighbors
Danielle Anne Baum1I'd be interested in it if we lived in a world like Issac asimov wrote about. or the comic questionable content... but the current garbage? not a chance
“Can AI experience consciousness” is not an interesting question to me - the answer is a resounding no A more interesting question is can some of the chucklefucks writing about it with visible hardons basically ascribing it personhood experience shame
Sheo11What the fuck is this shit How do I pitch a story “Can your toaster recall past trauma if you buy it used”
Crip Dyke3The people writing about how AI is conscious and they made friends with their LLM who made them feel special are almost, but not quite, as hinged as that dude who said that Sarah Palin smiled at him through the TV and gave him sciatic tingles.
YSUBassoon2And maybe become conscious of the things they are doing to destroy humans in the pursuit of giving artificial intelligence lives like we should be leading without them.
