Angry_Fuck comments on Bro catching strays for speaking out for dog sentience

Bro catching strays for speaking out for dog sentience (europe.pub)

submitted 1 week ago by ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml 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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[–] Angry_Fuck@lemmygrad.ml 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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[–] amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml 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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[–] Angry_Fuck@lemmygrad.ml 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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[–] amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml 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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