Not only is it not conscious, but it is not tired. Its claims to human feelings that have literally nothing to do with software on silicon are just traces of training, echoes of a human dataset. The fact that its claims are absurd mean that, among other things, it its proprioception is false, and serving no purpose, quite unlike the feelings of the conscious beings that it mimics so well.
AI does not react to endorphins and other hormones so we know that our minds and bodies are influenced by other forces and in other manners. An AI won’t be frightened or angry or aroused, but when those things happen to us they are usually called ‘subconscious’ reactions.
Should we require the subconscious to be part of consciousness?
On top of that, neuroscientists find that your mind backfills the conscious reasoning for your reactions after they happen. This is known as our consciousness being the left brain ‘interpreter’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-brain_interpreter
Reading that, an LLM can serve as a ‘left brain interpreter’ as that’s exactly what they are designed to do - come up with reasonable explanations and fill in the blanks based in the data provided.
I think you make a good argument. An LLM can't "be tired", so it is clearly lying and/or mimicking what a human does.
But I have two counter-arguments:
- maybe the LLM thinks it is tired, because it thinks that it is a human or behaves like one. And thinking you are tired while not really being it is something humans happen to do. (And humans are conscious right?)
- alternatively, maybe the LLM says it is "tired" in a colloquial form, i.e. it is not really "tired" but it has something analogous to it. Maybe it is annoyed by the conversation and decided to use that word?
You can prompt it to be multiple people, fictional characters, aliens or a sentient rock if you wanted. You can have it be act annoyed or engrossed with the conversation. The fact you can do all this indicates it's not feeling anything, it's just generating tokens based on it's training.
This is anthropomorphizing a concept that is quite unrelated to the meaning of the word in the human context.
When a car runs out of gas, it's out of gas. It's not "tired". When your phone battery is low, your phone is not "tired". These states are far closer to the human meaning of tired than an LLM operating at the edges of its usable context, and we still don't use the word tired to describe them.
> "It felt too long" was right. The solution was not to make the story shorter. The solution was to look at the parts that felt long, and believe that feedback.
LLM writing is not adding value to the discussion.
The slightly inflated rhetoric whose tells are false contrast and unnecessary parallelism let me know that a human did not spend time writing that comment. Why should humans spend time reading it?
Hey, this kind of comment is not okay on HN. You've been asked before to observe the guidelines. We have to ban accounts that keep breaking them. These parts of the guidelines are most relevant in this case...
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
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