At some point in the mid-late 1990s, I recall having a (technically-inclined) friend who dialed up to a BBS and spent a considerable amount of time pinging and then chatting with Lisa, the "sysadmin's sister". When I heard about it, I spent quite some time arguing with him that Lisa was a bot. He was pretty convinced that she was human.
this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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This is an angle I've never considered before, with regards to a future dystopia with a corrupt AI running the show. AI might never advance beyond what it is in 2025, but because people believe it's a supergodbrain, we start putting way too much faith in its flawed output, and it's our own credulity that dismantles civilisation rather than a runaway LLM with designs of its own. Misinformation unwittingly codified and sanctified by ourselves via ChatGeppetto.
The call is coming from inside the ~~house~~ mechanical Turk!
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Whatever, couldn't it also be that a technical consciousness will look rather different from what we assume? There are obviously less/none of some factors, ie emotional intelligence etc. But a tech super intelligence, if ever reached, may have a number of unexpected problems for us. We should concentrate on unexpected outcomes and establish safeguards.
Its a friend the way the nice waitress is a friend when you go eat out.
The LLM peddlers seem to be going for that exact result. That's why they're calling it "AI". Why is this surprising that non-technical people are falling for it?
You don't have to be tech person to see through bullshit. Any person with mid level expertise can test the limits of the current LLM capabilities. It can't provide consistently objectively correct outputs. It is still a useful tool though.
Mid level expertise in basically anything may be out of reach for younger gen z given the state of the education systems they lived through and the business practices that no longer prioritize training or continuing education. Assuming they can get hired at all when everyone is only hiring senior staff
Education was always garbage though. It is designed to generate obidient wage slaves. Any person who wanted to get good always knew that self study is the only way to get leveled up.
Your coworkers have no incentive to train you. This has also started since at least 1990s. Just how corpos operate.
Point I am making, none of this is new or specific to gen z
I guess covid is unique to them tho but covid didn't make education shite, it just exposed it imho
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Lots of attacks on Gen Z here, some points valid about the education that they were given from the older generations (yet it's their fault somehow). Good thing none of the other generations are being fooled by AI marketing tactics, right?
The debate on consciousness is one we should be having, even if LLMs themselves aren't really there. If you're new to the discussion, look up AI safety and the alignment problem. Then realize that while people think it's about preparing for a true AGI with something akin to consciousness and the dangers that we could face, we have have alignment problems without an artificial intelligence. If we think a machine (or even a person) is doing things because of the same reasons we want them done, and they aren't but we can't tell that, that's an alignment problem. Everything's fine until they follow their goals and the goals suddenly line up differently than ours. And the dilemma is - there's not any good solutions.
But back to the topic. All this is not the fault of Gen Z. We built this world the way it is and raised them to be gullible and dependent on technology. Using them as a scapegoat (those dumb kids) is ignoring our own failures.
Not the fault of prior generations, either. They were raised by their parents, and them by their parents, and so on.
Sometime way back there was a primordial multicellular life form that should have known better.
The main point here (which I think is valid despite my status as a not in this group Gen Z) is that we're still like really young? I'm 20 dude, it's just not my or my friends fault that school failed us. The fact it failed us was by design and despite my own and others complaints it's continued to fail the next generation and alpha is already, very clearly struggling. I really just don't think there's much ground to argue about how Gen Z by and large should somehow know better. The whole point of the public education system is to ensure we well educate our children, it's simply not my or any child's fault that school is failing to do so. Now that I'm an adult I can, and I do push for improved education but clearly people like me don't have our priorities straight seeing who got elected...
Failure often comes at multiple points, it doesn't just fail at one. It's a failure of education, of social pressures, of lack of positive environments, and yes of choice. The problem with free will is that you have the chance to choose wrong. You can blame everyone in the world, but if you don't take accountability for your own actions and choices, nothing will change.
There has never been a time with as much access to information as now. While there as much, likely more, misinformation... that does not mean individuals have no culpability for their own lack of knowledge or understanding.
That doesn't mean it's exclusively their fault, or even anywhere near a majority. But that does not mean they lose all free will for their own actions. It does not mean they have no ability to be better.
Should we place the weight of the world on their shoulders? Absolutely not, that is liable to break them. But we also shouldn't hide them from the burden of their own free will. That only weakens them.
I find it unfair to blame my peers for things largly out of their control. If you are born into an abusive family you'll only ever know if you happen to luck into the information that such behavior is unhealthy. Is it some of their faults? Certainly, I know people who are willfully stupid and refuse to learn but even knowing these people I feel pretty uncomfortable blaming them for it. I've talked to them, I've educated them on stuff they were willfully ignorant of and do you know what it generally boils down to? School has taught them that learning things is hard and a waste of their time. They'd rather waste hours trying to get an LLM to generate a script for them than sit down and figure out how to do it despite knowing I'd happily help them.
School has managed to taint "learning" in the minds of many of my peers to such an extent that it should be avoided at any cost. School has failed us, is still failing the current generation and nothing is going to be done about it because it's working as it's meant to. This is the intended outcome. Like genuinely the scale of the fuckup is to the extent that enjoying reading is not just rare but seen as weird. We've managed to take one of the best ways to educate yourself and instill dread in our children when it's brought up. How do we expect people who've been taught to hate reading to just magically turn around and unfuck themselves? What'd they see a really motivating Tik Tok or some shit? I despise that platform but like seriously you older people just don't it man. Been complaing since middle school and now people wanna turn around and blame us as if it's some personal failing it's fucked up dude. Our education sucks, has sucked and will continue to suck even worse until we stop pretending like this is some kind of personal failing.
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That's a bit of a reach. We should have stayed in the trees though, but the trees started disappearing and we had to change.
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That's a matter of philosophy and what a person even understands "consciousness" to be. You shouldn't be surprised that others come to different conclusions about the nature of being and what it means to be conscious.
If it was actually AI sure.
This is an unthinking machine algorithm chewing through mounds of stolen data.
To be fair, so am i
That is certainly one way to view it. One might say the same about human brains, though.
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Consciousness is an emergent property, generally self awareness and singularity are key defining features.
There is no secret sauce to llms that would make them any more conscious than Wikipedia.
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Are we really going to devil's advocate for the idea that avoiding society and asking a language model for life advice is okay?
It's not devil's advocate. They're correct. It's purely in the realm of philosophy right now. If we can't define "consciousness" (spoiler alert: we can't), then it makes it impossible to determine with certainty one way or another. Are you sure that you yourself are not just fancy auto-complete? We're dealing with shit like the hard problem of consciousness and free will vs determinism. Philosophers have been debating these issues for millennia and were not much closer to a consensus yet than we were before.
And honestly, if the CIA's papers on The Gateway Analysis from Project Stargate about consciousness are even remotely correct, we can't rule it out. It would mean consciousness preceeds matter, and support panpsychism. That would almost certainly include things like artificial intelligence. In fact, then the question becomes if it's even "artificial" to begin with if consciousness is indeed a field that pervades the multiverse. We could very well be tapping into something we don't fully understand.
The only thing one can be 100% certain of is that one is having an experience. If we were a fancy autocomplete then we'd know we had it 😉
What do you mean? I don't follow how the two are related. What does being fancy auto-complete have anything to do with having an experience?
It's an answer on if one is sure if they are not just a fancy autocomplete.
More directly; we can't be sure if we are not some autocomplete program in a fancy computer but since we're having an experience then we are conscious programs.
When I say "how can you be sure you're not fancy auto-complete", I'm not talking about being an LLM or even simulation hypothesis. I'm saying that the way that LLMs are structured for their neural networks is functionally similar to our own nervous system (with some changes made specifically for transformer models to make them less susceptible to prompt injection attacks). What I mean is that how do you know that the weights in your own nervous system aren't causing any given stimuli to always produce a specific response based on the most weighted pathways in your own nervous system? That's how auto-complete works. It's just predicting the most statistically probable responses based on the input after being filtered through the neural network. In our case it's sensory data instead of a text prompt, but the mechanics remain the same.
And how do we know whether or not the LLM is having an experience or not? Again, this is the "hard problem of consciousness". There's no way to quantify consciousness, and it's only ever experienced subjectively. We don't know the mechanics of how consciousness fundamentally works (or at least, if we do, it's likely still classified). Basically what I'm saying is that this is a new field and it's still the wild west. Most of these LLMs are still black boxes that we only barely are starting to understand how they work, just like we barely are starting to understand our own neurology and consciousness.
No, but thinking about whether it's conscious is an independent thing.
There's no reason to think it's conscious. That's just advertising for [product]. My Product Is Conscious.
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The world is going to be absolutely fucked when the older engineers and techies who built all this modern shit and/or maintain it and still understand it all retire or die off.
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Not sure what's alarming about that. It's a bit early to worry about an AI Dred Scott, no?
It's alarming people are so gullible that a glorified autocorrect can fool them into thinking it's sapient
Is it still passing the Turing test if you don't think either one is human?
"how dare you insult my robot waifu?!"
They also are the dumbest generation with a COVID education handicap and the least technological literacy in terms of mechanics comprehension. They have grown up with technology that is refined enough to not need to learn troubleshooting skills past "reboot it".
How they don't understand that a LLM can't be conscious is not surprising. LLMs are a neat trick, but far from anything close to consciousness or intelligence.
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I wasn't aware the generation of CEOs and politicians was called "Gen Z".
We have to make the biggest return on our investments, fr fr
The article targets its study on Gen Z but.... yeah, the elderly aren't exactly winners here, either.
The batshit insane part of that is they could just make easy canned answers for thank yous, but nope...IT'S THE USER'S FAULT!
edit: To the mass downvoting prick who is too cowardly to comment, whats it like to be best friends with a calculator?
One would think if they're as fucking smart as they believe they are they could figger a way around it, eh??? 🤣
Those lovable little simpletons.
Are we positive that they're conscious? I just think we should run some tests.
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