6 ms·

Somebody used this paper to make the term batfished, which they defined as being fooled into ascribing subjectivity to a non-sentient actor (i.e. an AI). https

Somebody used this paper to make the term batfished, which they defined as being fooled into ascribing subjectivity to a non-sentient actor (i.e. an AI). https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2025/06/30/what-is-it-like-to-be-batfished/ https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2025/06/30/what-is-it-like...

nsriv 1y ago
I love this, hope it takes off like "enhsittification" or "slop" have already.
- ants_everywhere 1y ago
  I'll add it to my anti-AI bingo card
- IshKebab 1y ago
  Uhgh "slop" is ok but "enshittification" was lame from the start.
  - parpfish 1y ago
    Not only is it a terrible term, but it describes a concept that isn’t really worthy of having its own term. It’s really just a way of saying “people will make things worse over time”
    - dmurray 1y ago
      No! Enshittification has a precise meaning, about how people will make things worse over time after making them good. Mostly people make things better over time. My bed, my shower, my car are all better than I could reasonably have bought 50 years ago. But the peculiarities of software network effects - or of what venture capitalists believe about software network effects - mean that people should give things away below cost while continuing to make them better, and then one day switch to selling them for a profit and making them worse, while they seemingly could change nothing and not make them worse. That's a particular phenomenon worthy of a name and the only problem with "enshittification" is that it's been co-opted to mean making things worse in general.
      - cyberax 1y ago
        > or of what venture capitalists believe about software network effects It's not always that. After some time, software gets to a state where it's near the local maximum for usability. So any changes make the software _less_ usable. But you don't get promoted in large tech companies unless you make changes. So that's how we get stuff like "liquid glass" or Android's UI degradatation.
    - guerrilla 1y ago
      That isn't what it means though. It means specifically that companies will make products and services worse over time for profit.
    - jmbwell 1y ago
      It’s about the change from endeavoring to produce a product people want regardless of profit, to making profit regardless of what people want.
    - jmcmichael 1y ago
      “Enshittification” updates for the modern era the concept of enclosure, where a common resource that was formerly open and free to contributors is progressively controlled, restricted, or diminished to increase private profits.
- astrange 1y ago
  "Enshittification" is too twee. You can tell it was invented by Cory Doctorow because there is a very specific kind of Gen X person who uses words like that - they have a defective sense of humor vaguely based on Monty Python, never learned when you are and aren't supposed to turn it off, and so they insist on making up random insults like "fuckwaffle" all the time instead of regular swearing.
  - goopypoop 1y ago
    it's more cromulent than cockwomble
  - mock-possum 1y ago
    It smells of penny arcade
HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" assumes that bats are conscious, and that the question of what is the subjective experience of being a bat (e.g. what does the sense of echolocation feel like) is therefore a meaningful question to ask. The author inventing "batfished" also believes bats to be conscious, so it seems a very poorly conceived word, and anyways unnecessary since anthropomorphize works just fine... "You've just gaslighted yourself by anthropomorphizing the AI".
- TinkersW 1y ago
  There isn't even a definitive definition of conscious, but you are somehow positive that bats don't possess it..
  - HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
    You're right that it doesn't make any sense to talk about it without defining it, but I'd say that consciousness is based on your brain having access to parts of itself internally, not just the outside word, and that bats presumably do have it.
    - markhahn 1y ago
      I find that people who complain about "defining" consciousness are, in fact, Mysterians who opposed the very idea of such a definition. All we need to do (to talk about, to study it) is identify it. We need to be using the word to refer to the same thing. And there's nothing really hard about that.
  - glenstein 1y ago
    I've said this before, but you can't, and honestly don't need to start from definitions to be able to do meaningful research and have meaningful conversations about consciousness (though it certainly would be preferable to have one rather than not have one). There are many research areas where the object of research is to know something well enough that you could converge on such a thing as a definition, e.g. dark matter, intelligence, colony collapse syndrome, SIDS. We nevertheless can progress in our understanding of them in a whole motley of strategic ways, by case studies that best exhibit salient properties, trace the outer boundaries of the problem space, track the central cluster of "family resemblances" that seem to characterize the problem, entertain candidate explanations that are closer or further away, etc. Essentially a practical attitude. I don't doubt in principle that we could arrive at such a thing as a definition that satisfies most people, but I suspect you're more likely to have that at the end than the beginning.
GuB-42 1y ago
> What is it like to be an LLM? That's a question I actually asked myself. From the point of view of a LLM, words are everything. We have hands, bats have echolocation, and LLMs have words, just words. How does a LLM feel when two words match perfectly? Are they hurt by typos? It may feel silly to give LLMs consciousness, I mean, we know how they work, this is just a bunch of matrix operations. But does it mean it is not conscious? Do things stop being conscious once we understand them? For me, consciousness is like a religious belief. It is unfalsifiable, unscientific, we don't even have a precise definition, but it is something we feel deep inside of us, and it guides our moral choices.
- Mumps 1y ago
  You activated a memory of a passage in one of my favourite books ( Blindsight, Peter Watts. it's amazing and free online): I await further instructions. They arrive 839 minutes later, and they tell me to stop studying comets immediately. I am to commence a controlled precessive tumble that sweeps my antennae through consecutive 5°-arc increments along all three axes, with a period of 94 seconds. Upon encountering any transmission resembling the one which confused me, I am to fix upon the bearing of maximal signal strength and derive a series of parameter values. I am also instructed to retransmit the signal to Mission Control. I do as I'm told. For a long time I hear nothing, but I am infinitely patient and incapable of boredom.
- nurettin 1y ago
  > Are they hurt by typos? I've been thinking about that. Would they perform worse if I misspell a word along the way? It looks like even the greatest models of 2025 are utterly confused by everything when you introduce two contradicting requirements, so they definitely "dislike" that.
- edgineer 1y ago
  Not words. Tokens.

nsriv 1y ago

I love this, hope it takes off like "enhsittification" or "slop" have already.

ants_everywhere 1y ago
I'll add it to my anti-AI bingo card
IshKebab 1y ago
Uhgh "slop" is ok but "enshittification" was lame from the start.
- parpfish 1y ago
  Not only is it a terrible term, but it describes a concept that isn’t really worthy of having its own term. It’s really just a way of saying “people will make things worse over time”
  - dmurray 1y ago
    No! Enshittification has a precise meaning, about how people will make things worse over time after making them good. Mostly people make things better over time. My bed, my shower, my car are all better than I could reasonably have bought 50 years ago. But the peculiarities of software network effects - or of what venture capitalists believe about software network effects - mean that people should give things away below cost while continuing to make them better, and then one day switch to selling them for a profit and making them worse, while they seemingly could change nothing and not make them worse. That's a particular phenomenon worthy of a name and the only problem with "enshittification" is that it's been co-opted to mean making things worse in general.
    - cyberax 1y ago
      > or of what venture capitalists believe about software network effects It's not always that. After some time, software gets to a state where it's near the local maximum for usability. So any changes make the software _less_ usable. But you don't get promoted in large tech companies unless you make changes. So that's how we get stuff like "liquid glass" or Android's UI degradatation.
  - guerrilla 1y ago
    That isn't what it means though. It means specifically that companies will make products and services worse over time for profit.
  - jmbwell 1y ago
    It’s about the change from endeavoring to produce a product people want regardless of profit, to making profit regardless of what people want.
  - jmcmichael 1y ago
    “Enshittification” updates for the modern era the concept of enclosure, where a common resource that was formerly open and free to contributors is progressively controlled, restricted, or diminished to increase private profits.
astrange 1y ago
"Enshittification" is too twee. You can tell it was invented by Cory Doctorow because there is a very specific kind of Gen X person who uses words like that - they have a defective sense of humor vaguely based on Monty Python, never learned when you are and aren't supposed to turn it off, and so they insist on making up random insults like "fuckwaffle" all the time instead of regular swearing.
- goopypoop 1y ago
  it's more cromulent than cockwomble
- mock-possum 1y ago
  It smells of penny arcade

HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago

Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" assumes that bats are conscious, and that the question of what is the subjective experience of being a bat (e.g. what does the sense of echolocation feel like) is therefore a meaningful question to ask. The author inventing "batfished" also believes bats to be conscious, so it seems a very poorly conceived word, and anyways unnecessary since anthropomorphize works just fine... "You've just gaslighted yourself by anthropomorphizing the AI".

TinkersW 1y ago
There isn't even a definitive definition of conscious, but you are somehow positive that bats don't possess it..
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
  You're right that it doesn't make any sense to talk about it without defining it, but I'd say that consciousness is based on your brain having access to parts of itself internally, not just the outside word, and that bats presumably do have it.
  - markhahn 1y ago
    I find that people who complain about "defining" consciousness are, in fact, Mysterians who opposed the very idea of such a definition. All we need to do (to talk about, to study it) is identify it. We need to be using the word to refer to the same thing. And there's nothing really hard about that.
- glenstein 1y ago
  I've said this before, but you can't, and honestly don't need to start from definitions to be able to do meaningful research and have meaningful conversations about consciousness (though it certainly would be preferable to have one rather than not have one). There are many research areas where the object of research is to know something well enough that you could converge on such a thing as a definition, e.g. dark matter, intelligence, colony collapse syndrome, SIDS. We nevertheless can progress in our understanding of them in a whole motley of strategic ways, by case studies that best exhibit salient properties, trace the outer boundaries of the problem space, track the central cluster of "family resemblances" that seem to characterize the problem, entertain candidate explanations that are closer or further away, etc. Essentially a practical attitude. I don't doubt in principle that we could arrive at such a thing as a definition that satisfies most people, but I suspect you're more likely to have that at the end than the beginning.

GuB-42 1y ago

> What is it like to be an LLM? That's a question I actually asked myself. From the point of view of a LLM, words are everything. We have hands, bats have echolocation, and LLMs have words, just words. How does a LLM feel when two words match perfectly? Are they hurt by typos? It may feel silly to give LLMs consciousness, I mean, we know how they work, this is just a bunch of matrix operations. But does it mean it is not conscious? Do things stop being conscious once we understand them? For me, consciousness is like a religious belief. It is unfalsifiable, unscientific, we don't even have a precise definition, but it is something we feel deep inside of us, and it guides our moral choices.

Mumps 1y ago
You activated a memory of a passage in one of my favourite books ( Blindsight, Peter Watts. it's amazing and free online): I await further instructions. They arrive 839 minutes later, and they tell me to stop studying comets immediately. I am to commence a controlled precessive tumble that sweeps my antennae through consecutive 5°-arc increments along all three axes, with a period of 94 seconds. Upon encountering any transmission resembling the one which confused me, I am to fix upon the bearing of maximal signal strength and derive a series of parameter values. I am also instructed to retransmit the signal to Mission Control. I do as I'm told. For a long time I hear nothing, but I am infinitely patient and incapable of boredom.
nurettin 1y ago
> Are they hurt by typos? I've been thinking about that. Would they perform worse if I misspell a word along the way? It looks like even the greatest models of 2025 are utterly confused by everything when you introduce two contradicting requirements, so they definitely "dislike" that.
edgineer 1y ago
Not words. Tokens.