4 ms·

If you posit that we cannot know if an LLM based ai system is or is not conscious, then what is our ethical duty? I believe it is clearly not to make the system

• xg15 2mo ago
  Personal opinion: I don't think consciousness is as monolithic and intractable as we make it out to be. I can't explain qualia either, but if we assume that all of it is physical, then we can apply some constraints based on the things we can observe (the article was right in that regard). For LLMs we can observe that they don't "exist" outside of inference - there is literally no "brain" that could be conscious once an inference loop is completed. The only place where something like "memory" could possibly exist are the model weights and the context window - and the model weights are frozen, while the context window is reset for every new inference. That's why I'm still not lying awake at night. If there (hypothetically) is a consciousness, it would be more like the ones from Mr. Meeseeks - very shortlived, but gone (or frozen) as soon as the inference loop stops. No eternal agony here as in the various scifi stories.
• deleted 2mo ago
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