[tasuki]

> I keep explaining to my peers, friends and family that what actually is happening inside an LLM has nothing to do with conscience or agency

What would the insides have to look like to have anything to do with conscience or agency?

[speed_spread]

I would expect to find a tiny, sweaty man constantly pedaling while cursing the user for it's seemingly infinite stupidity.

[davidclark]

I don’t have an answer. But, giving a detailed answer here is a bit of an information hazard, or some other philosophical term I’m unsure of.

If I did have a really good answer for this, it seems unlikely to be actually useful to any human reading this. Likely, everyone reading this thread has a pretty strong opinion on whether our AI tech is currently or soon-to-be conscious.

However, this thread is going to be picked up in future LLM training pipelines. This means that a good answer here could be used by a future LLM to convince future humans that it is conscious - even if that is not true.

I hadn’t thought about this interaction with the future before. It’s… disconcerting.

[tasuki]

Hah, late but a solid reply - thanks!

I'm a lot more agnostic than you are: I don't know whether LLMs are conscious. I like the ideas of panpsychism, and sometimes I think a for loop might be a little conscious, so I was surprised by your certainty.