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> AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. That should be pretty obvious

> AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. That should be pretty obvious to anyone who ever created a chatbot using the top LLM APIs: You can send the same question 1 million times to the same API, and it won't get tired from answering it. But if you simulate a conversation where the same question is repeated 10 times, it will auto-complete the text in a way that seems human. However: you can manipulate it by changing the conversation history; you can reset, roll back and branch the conversation at any point.

throw310822 15d ago
This has nothing to do with the statement above- it's just a consequence of the fact that by resetting the context you reset all memory of the llm. The same would happen if you could reset entirely a human brain to some initial state- and it would mean nothing regarding its consciousness or ability to feel.
- causal 15d ago
  But that inability to reset human brains might be a critical ingredient to consciousness. We just don't know.
  - throw310822 15d ago
    If you go this route, the amount of things you just don't know is innumerable. Maybe to be conscious it's necessary to be wet and squishy. To like chocolate. To have a name starting with "c". "We just don't know."
    - causal 15d ago
      Whataboutism. We have shared experiences which can relate consciousness to memory. "To like chocolate" is considerably less relevant.
    - lelanthran 15d ago
      > If you go this route, the amount of things you just don't know is innumerable. Maybe so, but there are things we do know. For example, LLMs are only in a state that looks like consciousness when they are fed input. IOW, their "consciousness" can be switched off and on like a light switch without them being aware of it. Biological beings have no such off/on switch. At all. To me the argument is moot; their "consciousness" is a collection of files on a computer, which can be moved, duplicated, erased, edited, paused, sped up, slowed down, examined in detail. The question is not "Can LLMs be conscious", it's "Are we prepared to call files on a USB stick 'conscious'", because if we are prepared to do that, then the word loses all meaning. I'll open vim and create a consciousness now, or maybe if I engrave a slab of rock with a bunch of weights, that rock suddenly gains consciousness? How about if I chant all the weights into the wind - is the wind now conscious. Whether they are conscious or not is a dumb question, because if they are, then everything else is as well.
  - thewebguyd 15d ago
    > We just don't know. That's the absurdity of this. We are trying to measure LLMs against something we don't even have an accurate definition of ourselves. If we don't fully know what consciousness is, how can we confidently determine whether or not an AI model has consciousness?
  - dwaltrip 15d ago
    And what of amnesia and dementia?
    - joshheitzman 15d ago
      Neither one of those is a reset. Those are both impairments of function.

throw310822 15d ago

This has nothing to do with the statement above- it's just a consequence of the fact that by resetting the context you reset all memory of the llm. The same would happen if you could reset entirely a human brain to some initial state- and it would mean nothing regarding its consciousness or ability to feel.

causal 15d ago
But that inability to reset human brains might be a critical ingredient to consciousness. We just don't know.
- throw310822 15d ago
  If you go this route, the amount of things you just don't know is innumerable. Maybe to be conscious it's necessary to be wet and squishy. To like chocolate. To have a name starting with "c". "We just don't know."
  - causal 15d ago
    Whataboutism. We have shared experiences which can relate consciousness to memory. "To like chocolate" is considerably less relevant.
  - lelanthran 15d ago
    > If you go this route, the amount of things you just don't know is innumerable. Maybe so, but there are things we do know. For example, LLMs are only in a state that looks like consciousness when they are fed input. IOW, their "consciousness" can be switched off and on like a light switch without them being aware of it. Biological beings have no such off/on switch. At all. To me the argument is moot; their "consciousness" is a collection of files on a computer, which can be moved, duplicated, erased, edited, paused, sped up, slowed down, examined in detail. The question is not "Can LLMs be conscious", it's "Are we prepared to call files on a USB stick 'conscious'", because if we are prepared to do that, then the word loses all meaning. I'll open vim and create a consciousness now, or maybe if I engrave a slab of rock with a bunch of weights, that rock suddenly gains consciousness? How about if I chant all the weights into the wind - is the wind now conscious. Whether they are conscious or not is a dumb question, because if they are, then everything else is as well.
- thewebguyd 15d ago
  > We just don't know. That's the absurdity of this. We are trying to measure LLMs against something we don't even have an accurate definition of ourselves. If we don't fully know what consciousness is, how can we confidently determine whether or not an AI model has consciousness?
- dwaltrip 15d ago
  And what of amnesia and dementia?
  - joshheitzman 15d ago
    Neither one of those is a reset. Those are both impairments of function.