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Bro catching strays for speaking out for dog sentience (europe.pub)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/technology@lemmygrad.ml
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A Futurism article about "AI bros are having a meltdown because the Associated Press stylebook clarifies that AIs don’t have feelings" featured this guy's tweets in the first sentence. Turns out he was talking about dogs instead of AI.

For some reason I can't stop laughing about this.

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[–] -3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (9 children)

There is no substance or arguments in any of these ramblings, just constant repetition that AI "is nothing like a human." Which I have already addressed this slop with the discussion about running, but you are just stuck in a loop repeating the same thing over and over again when it has no relevance to anything I've stated. You cannot defend your position so you operate on a straw man that people saying AI can think are saying AI is literally identical to a human and so you constantly go in circles repeating a fallacy no one even claimed.

You, and frankly most people, have an extremely emotional attachment to the idea that so somehow thought is something special that only humans can do, and this strong emotional feeling prevents you from engaging in the discussion honestly. You can't actually address what I am saying and you can't represent my arguments accurately because an emotional block in your brain prevents you from doing so.

You just keep in a loop like a machine going back to "but it's not like a human but it's not like a human!!! Oh my god i cant believe you made a slightly loose analogy to humans for illustrative purposes don't you know they're not literally the same as humans?!?!" Who tf cares if it's "like" a human? Why the hell does it need to be "like a human"? What's the relevance? Why does it even matter?

It's not relevant but you can't help but constantly bring it up because you and most everyone else has a brain block that disallows you to admit that there can be other kinds of thinking, even if it is not in a "human way," because you're afraid it makes humans seem less magical.

Nothing in your ramblings even addressed 1 of my points in the previous post. Because you can't address them because there is no logic behind your beliefs. You are just scrambling for some way to avoid the emotional discomfort from the cognitive dissonance in your head by throwing whatever at the wall without actually engaging with anything that was said, but ultimately you don't have to since most people have same mental block and will be on your side anyways.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago (8 children)

    Who tf cares if it’s “like” a human? Why the hell does it need to be “like a human”? What’s the relevance? Why does it even matter?

    Because when someone says it's intelligent, or it's aware, or it's conscious, or things like that, what do they tend to do (including you)? They compare it to conceptions of intelligence or awareness or consciousness that we have about humans. But if an LLM is nothing like a human, then this gets us no closer to understanding how to define what they are. And if attempts to do so end up being reductionist about what a human is in order to make human seem more like a computer, just so that we can fulfill this fantasy of computers coming to life, then we have actually lost understanding in the process, not gained something.

    I'm under no obligation to do a tiresome back and forth where I break each post down and continually respond to every single component of every response you make. I'm going to respond on my own terms and if you don't like that, then tough.

    Anyway, you're wrong about what I think and the arrogance of insisting you know what I'm going to say and you know how I think is holding you back. On this very forum, I've sided before with the view that a skill like writing is not as special as people make it out to be. That the theory of it can be figured out and then reproduced. It's actually more of a demystification, demagification view than what you're putting forth. The theme of it is that certain of things that humans take as impossible to understand and therefore "special" can be understood and then a machine that is almost nothing like us, with no consciousness, no actual mind, can be trained to do it well enough that it looks a lot like works we'd produce. Importantly, this does NOT mean either of the following on its own: 1) It does not mean the machine is a living entity. 2) It does not mean human beings are less than what they were thought to be. Any more than inventing a calculator means the calculator is a living entity and humans are less than we thought because a calculator can run numbers for us.

    1 is an extraordinary claim and prospect that requires extremely careful investigation. 2 just means that another of the things we do can be more readily understood on a theoretical level, which means we can actually (probably) become better at it than we are through the proper development and application of theory.

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  • [–] -3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)

    Because when someone says it’s intelligent, or it’s aware, or it’s conscious, or things like that, what do they tend to do (including you)?

    None of these things are the same at all.

    "Consciousness" also is not even real but just a modern variant of the "soul" for mystics who want to be taken more seriously.

    They compare it to conceptions of intelligence or awareness or consciousness that we have about humans

    So if I say a robot is running I'm arguing a robot is literally identical to a human and running in precisely the exact way humans do because humans also run?

    You talk of analogies. I don't know why no one on the internet knows what a fucking analogy is. An analogy is when you compare two unlike things to draw out similarities in structure.

    But everyone on the internet seems to think an analogy is when you claim two things are literally the same in all ways so they freak out whenever an analogy is made and start pointing out differences between the two things that are not actually relevant to what is being discussed.

    just so that we can fulfill this fantasy of computers coming to life

    I really can't be bothered to take an unironic vitalist seriously.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 week ago (4 children)

    There is nothing more I can say. You're now telling me consciousness is mysticism (lol what???). You can literally search "consciousness" online and find secular definitions like this:

    A sense of one's personal or collective identity, including the attitudes, beliefs, and sensitivities held by or considered characteristic of an individual or group.

    the quality or state of being aware especially of something within oneself

    And you're telling me I'm a "vitalist" when my whole deal here is that proper investigation is important.

    I have to laugh because otherwise I'm going to snap at you.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago* (3 children)

    People (the person you're replying to) will do literally anything before recognizing animals have unique sensory experiences and some degree of internal representation. Shit, literally anything besides recognizing a fellow human is a feeling creature, aware and cognizant. I will easily admit that animals are conscious (not just sentient) before any LLM.

    bUt tHiS iS vItAlIsM. Motherfuckers will ascribe intelligence to linear algebra before then to a bonobo or, God forbid, an animal they slaughter for meat.

    Fuck, you would even think that all the "stochastic" mumbo jumbo they spout in their book (click on their bio, it's a doozy) would warrant some distinction to humans and machines on the very specifics of the (who'd've thunk!) stochastics of neurons firing. Some people even have the "fringe" (unscientific) idea that the centrioles of the brain could contribute. And they are very much probably wrong! Even so, they have a better explanation than "chatGPT is my wife" levels of delusions the Dawkinian mind can conjure. Before writing, they should've done some reading.

    SMH my head

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    It's frustrating for sure. And my main concern with LLMs is that people are inclined to ascribe them what they think of as human-like intelligence (or other characteristics) basically because LLMs were trained on imitating human language and the metrics of their success in training and tuning is largely defined by how well they imitate that language. I think it's harder for people to see why an LLM's capability with language doesn't mean much inherently if they primarily interact with chatbots and treats the chatbot persona as an entity unto itself rather than a prompt for a persona atop model training.

    As it is, I wasn't imbued with skepticism of it myself. I had moments some years ago where I was new to LLMs, was mainly interacting with them in chatbot form, and tried to "test" them in various ways to see if I could see signs of awareness/intelligence/etc. Others helped bring me around to being more skeptical about it, along with just learning more about what models are / are doing on a functional level.

    I do think that when an LLM is able to, with the right prompting, work out a mathematical proof that hasn't been solved yet (or come very close - I forget quite how that story went), that's undeniably worth study as to why it's even possible in the first place. Stuff like that is a "wow" moment. But if we jump to "it's alive" or other similar language, we're skipping many steps of possibility along the way and that skipping is something a lot of us have been primed for with decades of media based on conceptions of AI having a "ghost in the machine", "developing awareness out of inexplicable circumstances," etc. Media has primed people to figure that a computer turning into something like the human mind is not only possible, but also likely while likely to happen in a way that is beyond comprehension. Which is an infantilizing intellectual position for us to be in.

    The way I see it, the much more sober outlook is that we're going to keep hitting hard limits on what we can get AI to do until we understand the human mind better. But in order to understand the human mind better, we have to get past the framework of thought that humans are like computers, else we still start to circle the drain; dragging down understanding of humans in the pursuit of AI, which will damage our understanding of both.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    I did read the AEON article and I found it's quite sober really nice.

    Thank you, comrade, for the reading material. I do believe that's really the best way to tackle this subject.

    I looked a little bit around and the only place I see the following information is on the "I put a fruit fly in Minecraft" video. But, apparently, one of the author's of the Nature paper about the full conectome of the fruitflies did consult the video's author and, when asked about the project, he said "yeah, it's a quite accurate model" when asked about the model neurons they are using for the project.

    And, from a bioinformatics standpoint, it's that, a model. It can mimic very well the behaviour of fruitflies, but we don't super duper know why or how. Specially when we just have the conectome (the wiring), not the "software" or chemical state of things at capture, and that's assuming one single individual fly, not all the possible states individual flies could have.

    So, yeah, it's a great model, but it's not real.

    I'm all in for finding more about the brain, so we can dispell the idea that LLMs are so human like and get on with our lives.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago

    I went and watched the "fruit fly in Minecraft" vid, thank you for mentioning it. Pretty interesting! Especially from a video game design standpoint, it intrigues me because stuff like that could make for more nuanced simulations to formulate a game around. Though like you say, a model, not the real biological thing in motion. And from the sound of it, a lot missing in terms of how it works and why it's doing what it's doing and so on.

    But yeah, I'm hoping we can, over time, reach a point where we have a better understanding of these things in general.

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  • [+] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 child)
    [removed by mod]
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  • [–] 0 points 1 week ago

    I've read Lenin and he repeats Kantian dualism and calls it "materialism," and this has poisoned the discussion on materialism so much that you unironically believe non-dualists are "vulgar materialists." If being a "dialectical materialist" means I have to be a Kantian then I'm not a dialectical materialist. Boohoo.

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