Quick Introduction We have all been on forums, chats, reddit, discord, youtube, or somewhere and heard “Oh! Model XYZ is AMAZEBALLZ!zomgwtfbbq” then downloaded it (or more likely, some quantized form of it) and said “eww… This sucks!” This post is going to be a rather technical series of experiments to demonstrate the impact of implementation-specific hazards with inference. I will be using the term “reference implementation” to describe the lab that published and offers first-party hosting of ...
I can’t believe how many pro-AI arguments essentially boil down to “I do not understand words”.
We have a very solid and explicit definition of what conscious means:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conscious#medicalDictionary
The best neuroscientists in the world do not even fully understand the complicated intricacies of the workings of the human mind. We do understand 100% exactly how computers work. There is no comparison.
I haven’t even argued that AI is concious, I have said that we do not understand consciousness enough to define it. You have completely missed the point. This is Dunning-Kruger at its peak. You are vastly oversimplifying things, at what size of brain is an animal considered conscious or capable of thought? Define thought. We don’t even have a solid understanding of life, much less thoughts. Yes we have a word definition, no we do not know where the line begins and ends. It is a philosophical question that remains unanswered.
This definition is already making so many assumptions and over simplifications. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/thought
We understand that the brain is what gives us our cognition, we understand that the brain is made up of chemical and electrical signals. We are not special.
This dude is a Dunning-Kruger case study. Simply by the shear overconfidence
I’m sorry that you have trouble grasping so many basic concepts.
Ironic of you to reference Dunning-Kruger.
All animals are conscious as far as I’m aware, though the complexity of their thoughts may vary. They all act of their own volition, computers do not and cannot act of their own volition.
You do not have to fully understand every aspect of consciousness in order to recognize that inanimate objects do not have it. “Will” is a component of consciousness, this is commonly understood. Computers are tools, they have no will. Computers calculate, they do not think, these are different operations.
I am not oversimplifying things, you are under-thinking things that are already simple (likely due to cognitive offloading).
The argument basically: “'computers are not sentient, because I say that they are not sentient”
Don’t forget the dictionary quotes and the personal attacks.
So your response boils down to “no u,” and insulting. I believe we are done here.
For what it’s worth, I thought it was an interesting read until the other person went full ad hominem.
If all you got from that explanation was “no u” then you need to work on your reading comprehension.
I agree that this conversation doesn’t seem to be bearing any fruit tho
Discussing the consciousness of neural networks is NOT being pro-AI. I’d say it’s even the opposite, as it displays the danger of such a technology.
Most of the words in the definition have multiple interpretations, it is not as easy as you wish it would be.
Finally, we do NOT at all know how trained neural networks work. We know how training and inference work. We can read the neurons, but the shear size of weights make it a rather impenetrable black box we have to study, partially, to understand the goals of the emergent sub networks.
Fearmongering about the idea of a neural network gaining consciousness is basically like doing free advertising for AI companies lmao
You are ascribing a power to them that they do not possess
For the record, I think neural networks have a lot of useful applications; for example, radiological image recognition. The term “AI” basically has no meaning though, and is most commonly used to describe LLMs, a technology that has very few (if any) good real world applications.
I am not fearmongering the fact it helps or not AI companies is not relevant here.
You are getting off topic.