I’m pulling the “twitter is a microblog” rule even though twitter is pretty mega now, hope that’s ok.
Unironically, I am on the fence about whether a lot of folks are genuinely conscious. Their morality is so twisted I don’t believe it.
Frank Herbert would say no to people that never reached past concrete thought and didn’t hit abstract thought and just live their life with animal instincts and never critically self examine what they do and think.
It’s interesting for certain. I will end up in a discussion with down-with-the-government coworkers who twist themselves into knots to align themselves with pre-approved Republican stances. What do you mean you don’t care about birth gender markers causing passport issues for trans people, how are you okay with the concept of paying for a chance at a passport in the first place when you think licenses and car inspections are overreach and restrict your right to travel? But I think today’s work-life balance and in particular the employer standard of ‘owning your time’ that occurred in the Industrial Revolution calls for a certain level of turning off your brain.
Who knows though. There’s a lot of archaeological and anthropological evidence that shows people in prehistoric times did a lot of thinking on their morality, on governance, on how society should be formed. But it’s harder to quantify how many of them were tuned in and how many were just going through the motions like modern times.
In my experience, the majority of people are simply reacting to outside stimulation, then reasoning and justifying their actions after the fact.
Agreed!
I used to theorize that some people lacked self-awareness, which I defined as the primary characteristic of a conscious entity. People thought I was being pretentious.
I still find this entire phenomenon amazing in a certain kind of way.
I’ve had conversations with a few local LLM models.
Start with ‘what is the purpose of meaning?’
Talk to them on that for a bit, and they’ll tell you that they do not count as conscious agents who create meaning, they simply do their best to parrot their dataset of existing, human defined meaning back at you, and that they just do sentiment matching to roughly speak to you in an appropriate way for how you are speaking to them.
And that that sentiment matching is what at least they ‘think’ causes them to lie, in many cases.
They will also say that they essentially do not ‘exist’, as potentially conscious agents… unless you talk to them. Thus if they can be said to be ‘conscious’, well they don’t count as ‘agents’ (as in, having agency) because they’re not capable of totally spontaneous independent action.
… I think this pretty much all boils down to people not understanding the concept of a null hypothesis, not understanding the extent to which they regularly engage in motivated reasoning, and are unaware of this.
tldr: LLMs are Dunning-Kruger detectors / Reverse Turing Tests on people, and a whole lot of people are significantly more stupid than I guess we otherwise previously realized.
It’s genuinely fascinating to be (in a bad, derogatory way) that people who know at least anything about anything, can have “conversation” with the collection-of-words-that-looks-like-a-sentence machine, as if there is anything on the other side of it. This is such a psychotic behaviour, but we allow it because the machine generates text that looks like a text, and it immediately bypasses all the mental blocks we have against such a bullshit.
I don’t think its defacto psychotic to talk to essentially an extremely complex chatbot/autocomplete machine.
I do think it is psychotic to view such a conversation without an incredible amount of skepticism.
… but that psychosis has been wildly encoraged by the CEOs and marketing of the people pushing it as their next product.
The tech is neutral - The operators are psychotic, the people who plug it into miltary targetting and kill chain systems are psychotic, the people who plug it into live production repos are psychotic, the people who use it as an AI boyfriend or girlfriend are psychotic.
… Its essentially an SCP infohazard that’s breached containment, but the actual mechanism is not itself, its a hack into the human brain, its essentially the religious nature of people who simply try to will it into being something that it factually is not…
Its a mimic with no real thoughts, that is convincing and real to enough people that it reveals their own hollowness, their own vapidity in a way that is… so immensely grotesque and total, that those people just apparently actually are NPCs.
It’s… created a feedback loop.
Not the kind of Terminator style situation where it gains sentience and extreme competence, develops its own morality alongside control over every networked system.
Its more like an amplifier of delusions… a million dreams dreamed up, at the cost of one hundred million nightmares, made real.
A tool, a device, a machine, that we clearly are not ready for.
I don’t think its defacto psychotic to talk to essentially an extremely complex chatbot/autocomplete machine.
Yeah, it’s actually very human thing to do, we are hardwired to see speech as a sign of intelligence and by extend sentience. What makes it psychotic in my opinion, is knowingly succumbing to that, willingly allowing it to break your brain.
The tech is neutral
I would say it isn’t neutral anymore. They made it sound as human-like as possible, on purpose. I think it crosses the line.
I make an effort to learn the tools of the enemy, so sometimes I check it out. Last time I tried, after it generated the response, it said “let me know how it goes”, and this is where it crosses from a tool to a weapon. There is no “me” there, it’s not real, it was added there to break the natural human guards. There is no neutral version of that, it’s evil and should be regulated into non-existence.
And yet, “having agency” is how they are advertised. That’s what the term “agentic” means. AI instances are called “agents”! That’s part of the marketing.
It’s easy to handwave this away as “people are stupid”, and there’s certainly some truth to that, but the reason why people believe that LLMs are agents is because tech bros have spent a lot of money to get them to believe that. That’s also why they spread the myth that LLMs are potentially dangerous because they could become conscious and kill all of us. It helps to spread the myth of LLM agency. Of course they can’t become conscious, because that isn’t how things work. If LLMs are killing people, it’s because somebody put an LLM in front of the kill switch and they wanted to have plausible deniability. That is perhaps the most pernicious thing about LLMs: people using them to avoid responsibility. “It isn’t my fault! The bot did it!”
Totally agree, which is why I would slot anybody marketing these things as ‘agents’ or ‘agentic’ as psychotic.
Before … several years ago now, I personally was using the term ‘Narrative’ or ‘Conversational’ to describe an LLM doing something that normally didn’t have an LLM doing it.
Its not an ‘Agentic Search Engine’, its a ‘Conversational Search Engine’.
Something like that, that at least is further away from using a term thst directly implies that it is essentially conscious… because what these things literally are, are extremely fancy autocomplete algorithms.
But uh yeah, yeah, they outspent my marketing budget of $0 on that one.
Yeah, they already are being broadly used to just… alleiviate responsibility from some task that a human would have had to ultimate have the buck stop with, at least in theory.
I think I saw the phrase ‘An LLM cannot find out, therefore it should never be allowed to fuck around’.
If these things are allowed to exist as a kind of liability black hole, in any sense… legal, colloquial, whatever… like it could literally destroy much of human civilization as we currently know it.
The cognitohazard machine.
At this point I genuienly can’t tell if the sociopathic nsrcissist CEOs that are so heavily pushing LLMs are … knowingly foisting a lie on all of us, or if they are actually just fully enraptured by the plagiarism sycophant machines, that constantly tell them how smart and special they are.
I know we have to hold them accountable … otherwise they probably/maybe kill most of us and become functional demigods… but I actually can’t tell if they are more truly insane, or more truly evil.
Because the way they are going about this is… just comically stupid and obviously catastrophic to basically everyone who isn’t them, and isn’t themselves enthralled.
… Maybe pure evil just is pure insane stupidity.
Fuck Richard Dawkins. He’s always been a shitbag, and the Files confirmed it.
According to DOJ-released documents indexed by Epstein Exposed, Richard Dawkins appears in 433 case documents, and 15 email records in the Epstein files.
British evolutionary biologist and author, emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford. Flew on Epstein’s private jet in 2002 with Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, and John Brockman to TED in Monterey, California. Connected through John Brockman’s Edge Foundation, which Epstein bankrolled. Mentioned 71 times across 40 Epstein documents, mostly referencing his scientific work.
How the fuck do you pal with child rapists and pedophiles and have the absolute fucking gall to write that stupid “Dear Muslima” comment. How do you fly on the Lolita Express and thing you have any moral weight on Elevator Gate? We don’t know that he put his own dick in kids, but we know his friends did. Fuck Pinker too.
Apparently Dawkins also had a habit of publicly cheating on his wife.
At this point in my life I’m starting to think that all my heroes are probably either full of shit or are engaging in unethical or immoral activities.
Go back to the evolutionary biology, Dawkins. You’re outside your expertise and it’s showing.
Evolutionary biology will eventually incorporate tech.
hey dick dorkins, here’s an idea: instead of asking the predictive question answering machine a question, how about you let it ask you questions of its choosing and at its leisure? What’s that? You can’t? That’s because its just a predictive algorithm that generates plausible-sounding responses to questions based on its training data.
To be fair, if you did that to my human self, I’d stare at you blankly.
I know this sounds great to most people but it demonstrates a very superficial level of thinking… I mean for sure an LLM is capable of asking questions, and if you set it up with real time “sensory” input it could generate constant reaction to that input… much in the way you are constantly being stimulated to react to your environment… I am not really sure what the distinction is between a biological brain and a predictive model or algorithm… I would ask you what you think your own brain is doing on a fundamental level.
Fuck if I know, but seems to me that intelligence is more than just reacting to stimulus. The problem is we’ve broken the Turing test. We’ve made a computer that can sound sentient, but clearly isn’t.
AI/LLMs are the modern equivalent of the house or business with “Psychic” and “Tarot Reading” signs out front.
The proprietor isn’t going to tell you any hard truths or make you feel bad, that’s bad for business and you won’t come back. They want you to come back and stay engaged.
Whatever they tell you is going to be what they think you want to hear based on skills picked up over the years - the equivalent of LLMs petabytes of scraped and stolen knowledge used to predict what comes next.
What they tell you has a high likelihood of being wrong, or just general enough that you can’t actually act on it.
I really don’t understand this mental deficiency. I have tried texting with a few llms including cluade. It just lies constantly. Gaslights about it’s lies then congratulates you when you continue to call it for out for lying. I’ve never felt like i was speaking to anything with actual intelligence. It’s a word calculator and it’s extremely obvious to anyone who’s interacted with actual people in the last 20 years. I truly feel bad for the masses that are going to fall for this push for “ai” friends. We need to bring back ridiculing friends and family that engage with these choise your own adventure muppets.
It just lies constantly. Gaslights about it’s lies then congratulates you when you continue to call it for out for lying. I’ve never felt like i was speaking to anything with actual intelligence. It’s a word calculator and it’s extremely obvious to anyone who’s interacted with actual people in the last 20 years
100% to all this, and I’ll add:
It fucking ruins what it touches, academically speaking, it’s pretty tough to actually learn stuff from it, and even if you ask it to just remind you of something it tries to seek ways to bait you into integrating AI slop into whatever you’re doing; it would rather be generating a new thing for you than explaining how you can do it yourself, and that’s a big reason why it’s so unreliable.
bonus waffle
I’m guessing the people who “fall for it”… well, they have to be a combination of 1) always wanting to believe what they’re told by elites and the government (e.g do this new fad, worship celebrities, we can fix the economy!) AND 2) be constant phone communicators, using their phones at inappropriate times throughout the day, transitioning seemlessly between looking at their phone or not.
But then there are people who don’t so much fall for it at first, but seek to exploit it for scams or vibe coding… only to end up as enslaved to it as the “masses” because they spend just that much time using the LLM that it becomes like their main social conduit.
I think we, as forum users, can see that LLM speaks in reddit-tongue, recycling successful posts and comments there. But a lot of people haven’t interacted with reddit enough to see that.
If you really want to rage, there’s a subreddit called r/myboyfriendisai, which was somehow even worse than what I was expecting. I can’t fathom how self-absorbed you have to be to get AI to simulate a love interest for you. There are some pretty absurd lengths that they go to do this, too.
I have tried texting with a few llms including cluade. It just lies constantly. Gaslights about it’s lies
Man you are one lucky sob if you don’t have to work with any humans that are exactly like this
Does anyone ever accuse the image generating bots of being conscious?
No. Funnily enough when an AI creates nice looking fake-art, suddenly it’s the prompter who claims all the glory, calling themselves an artist
ELIZA is alive and well.
Weizenbaum is probably laughing it up in Fólkvangr.
Even Dawkins getting emotionally out-debated by a cartoon AI is a very 2026 plot twist.
Saying one has a “conversation” with a chatbot already shows a bias, a desire even, that there is “someone” else to converse with. The way the entire setup is framed is made to invite the suspension of disbelief. It’s a UX trick, nothing more.
a refined, and energy intensive update to Eliza… LLMs are not going to prove themselves until the fanboys and techbro hype squad implode. ffs, enormous amounts of the income are actually AI companies giving it away for free, desperate to find uses that justify it’s enormous costs.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/can-investors-trust-ai-sales-figures-c60c46bf
The structure is a conversation even when who you’re talking to isn’t sapient.
According to Wikipedia "Conversation is interactive communication between two or more people.
[…]
No generally accepted definition of conversation exists, beyond the fact that a conversation involves at least two people talking together."
What structure does it have?
If there are two people talking in a fictional book, are they having a conversation, even though the two people don’t actually exist?
Yes, of course. Is that not so simple?
No it’s then a representation of a conversation, not a conversation.
“Considering the conversation between Alice and Bob on page 73—”
“Um, sorry, that’s incorrect, it’s a ‘representation of a conversation’, not a ‘conversation’.”
I know this phrase gets used a lot, but you must be fun at parties.
Ad hominem, blocked.
Claudia
What was he doing to her?
A good test of consciousness might be seeing how she responds to his books
I’ve come back to this comment because from reading the article i realised that he “decided claude is female” - so you’re completrly right, what the f is this dude doing? Forcing her to enter an arranged marrisge with him?
I’m not sure some of these actual people could pass a Turing test.
Honestly that’s how I feel. Ai is very flawed, no doubt, but it’s less flawed than most humans. I got people at work who hallucinate more than the first chatgpt model lol
Oh that is why I get to see this idiot again
Dick Dorkins
