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.
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.