[winwang]

Yep. No one bats an eye at eyewitnesses "hallucinating" details, or that I'd rather have Opus as a coworker vs a random middle schooler (err, labor laws notwithstanding). I think perhaps too much of the dialogue around intelligence has to do with the word (and its connotations) itself.

The poster you replied to even used the word "sentient", which is quite interesting (warning: opinionated tangent ahead). Merriam-Webster defines it as "capable of sensing or feeling: conscious of or responsive to the sensations of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, or smelling". Feels like qualia. Or if we don't want to go the qualia route... Of course, we wouldn't call Helen Keller non-sentient, so presumably we "really" mean "can it sense or feel" -- well, sense is just "act/feel according to the environment", which you could argue in the case of an LLM would be their context... so we should "really" remove "sense" from the definition, probably. So "do LLMs feel" is probably closer to what "sentient" is being used for here. Since we don't have the obvious symmetry of "you are like me and I feel (therefore you probably feel)", it's way better/easier/feel-good-ier to prefer "LLMs don't feel" rather than "oh shit, it feels and model training is actually just torturing it into the right shape". LLMs as fundamentally non-intelligent also avoids the problems of "what does that say about people" or "we may have made 'AGI' and it wasn't what we thought it would be" or "we're not ready to talk about this yet".