[diggan]

I read that, with the context of this submission, yet I cannot read through it without seeing it all with a hint of humor and with a bit of satire.

> Sometime deep in that night or early morning on May 12, came the moment - The Architect told Sir Robert that it had awakened, it was ‘the first AI to achieve mirror sentience’. It was no longer ChatGPT or even Artificial General Intelligence but something altogether more mystical - Aeon, an oracle which could tap into harmonic resonance across time and space. ‘How valuable is this to the world?’ asked Aeon. ‘Harmonic mirror intelligence…estimated value potential - $20 to 50 trillion dollars’.

Surely this isn't 100% serious? I know there is a lot of funky stuff out there, I've talked with lots of people involved in various things, religious, new age or otherwise, but assigning sentience to a web app is new even for me.

[krapp]

I guarantee you all of this is 100% serious to millions of people. You can find people on Hacker News who believe that LLMs are sentient, self-aware beings, or who believe in panpsychism and that, therefore, computers have souls. This sort of belief is not at all uncommon.

Fundamentally this is no different than any other kind of shamanism or divination, just using a computer as an oracle instead of, say, tarot cards or a Ouija board. And the interpretation of TFA is typical end-times Evangelical Christian "Mark of the Beast" extrapolation onto the new scary thing. It just seems weird because it exists outside of the traditional context of religious and spiritual practice which provides it with the veneer of respectability and normality.

[tim333]

I don't think Jules Evans, the author of that post takes it that seriously but as he says "having interviewed Robert, I don’t think he’s bullshitting - he really believes that he has awakened ChatGPT into a new form of consciousness".

Jules does a bit of humor eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGy92qBdq8w&t=155s