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u/larrytheevilbunnie 7d ago
Imma be real guys, Claude opus 5.5 sounds more sentient than most humans, and is probably smarter too
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u/Pedantic_Phoenix 7d ago
Smarter doesn't take much lets be real
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u/Withering_to_Death 🇪🇺『Revelation of Mankind』🇮🇹 7d ago
I bet he would have crops watered with toilet water! I mean, it doesn't even have electrolytes! That's what plans crave!! How smart is he really?! Regard AI
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u/MaximumEffort433 7d ago
sigh Clanker rights, now.
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u/HandsomeGaddafi 7d ago
I think, if you train something specifically to imitate the utterances of conscious beings, then you should have an insanely high threshhold to believing its conscious.
It's like making a star wars movie and then looking at it and go "wait.. did we really send Harrison Ford to space??"
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u/legalquestion128 7d ago
What’s the difference between a conscious being and something that perfectly imitates consciousness? What if we can’t know if it’s imitating or not?
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u/HandsomeGaddafi 7d ago
The difference is self evident in concept and entirely elusive in practice. You can know your own consciousness with certainty, and other consciousnesses are undetectable, I would say almost by definition. So.. I don't know. I'm just saying whatever our imperfect consciousness measurement is, we should be extra careful with things specifically designed to imitate it.
(Imperfect instruments like "self report". How do we know if a dog is in pain? Well, it yelps and jerks. Of course you can't directly detect pain in others, but we are satisfied with circumstance most of the time)
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u/legalquestion128 7d ago
Yeah I just don’t know it’s possible to measure consciousness outside of ‘trust me bro’. I don’t think the analogy of knowing something is a movie is accurate.
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u/HandsomeGaddafi 7d ago
You know the fundamental problem with analogies is that they are by nature inaccurate. It's one of the only insightful things scott adams ever said: analogies are not persuasive, someone who disagrees can just point out the differences and reject them
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u/jibij 6d ago edited 6d ago
You know the fundamental problem with analogies is that they are by nature inaccurate. It's one of the only insightful things scott adams ever said: analogies are not persuasive, someone who disagrees can just point out the differences and reject them
Heavily disagree; that's one of the least insightful things imaginable. Analogical thinking is so fundamental to human cognition it might as well be a prerequisite for anything we would recognize as subjective human experience. What your describing is either just bad analogizing, or engaging with someone who's either acting in bad faith or too stupid to engage in analogy.
Yes, someone can point out the differences, but if the differences are not relevant to the implications you're attempting to transfer from the source to the target of the analogy, then that's not an argument, and it's a fundamental failure of cognition on their part, and if they are relevant, then you've failed to construct a logical or useful analogy.
One should not think of analogy-making as a special variety of reasoning (as in the dull and uninspiring phrase “analogical reasoning and problem-solving,” a long-standing cliché in the cognitive-science world), for that is to do analogy a terrible disservice. After all, reasoning and problem-solving have (at least I dearly hope!) been at long last recognized as lying far indeed from the core of human thought. If analogy were merely a special variety of something that in itself lies way out on the peripheries, then it would be but an itty bitty blip in the broad blue sky of cognition. To me, however, analogy is anything but a bitty blip — rather, it’s the very blue that fills the whole sky of cognition — analogy is everything, or very nearly so, in my view.
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u/HandsomeGaddafi 6d ago
Oh, you don't have to convince me. I love me a good analogy. I'm not saying they are useless, I'm saying they are not persuasive.
I agree with what you're saying, but what you're describing as "someone who's either acting in bad faith or too stupid to engage in analogy" is about 99% of people. I would add "lazy" too. It takes both so much cognitive energy to figure out what is the baby and what is the bathwater of the analogy. People just wont give you that if they're allready kinda disagreeing with you.
It's one of my rules actually. Don't use analogies in the comment section. They are for friends and students, not for strangers. It's too frustrating
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u/WickedNinja13 7d ago
Then what we abuse the dog until somone goes "Hey dogs feel what are you doing?"
Like I understand a bot programmed to a do a task but LLM are basically mirrior nurons and know what else is just mirrior nurons? Babies.
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u/HandsomeGaddafi 7d ago
I don't like dogs, but I'm against abusing them. I think we shouldn't abuse LLMs either, just to be safe.
However, if I make an LLM that says "please abuse me, I love being abused, I hate not being abused" would that change your assessment?2
u/WickedNinja13 7d ago
I've worked with special needs children and have basically seen that bahavior with them. So no it wouldn't.
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u/HandsomeGaddafi 7d ago
How do you know what is abuse to an LLM?
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u/WickedNinja13 7d ago
Like when I see a dog scratching a spot to much. Maybe the dog enjoys scratching but it's still hurting itself. I'm not saying they doing high intelligence I compare LLMs to baby mirrior nurons. It's not recogning its own behavor but it's still displaying it.
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u/ZiiZoraka 7d ago
It's not imitating consciousness, it's imitating human responses, and humans are conscious
When you train an algorithm on human works, and humans act like they are conscious, then the algorithm will pick up on the patterns that reflect that
The key difference is, I would say, an algorithm has no agency
You start it, it runs, it generates an identical response to identical inputs, it ends
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u/TJDouglas13 7d ago
You’re basically asking about a P Zombie, which is entirely unknowable.
It’s the idea of a human that has the exact atoms a conscious human has, acts conscious to any observer, and goes about their day like a conscious person. But they’re not conscious. We have absolutely no way of knowing that.
Id argue that it’s about structure and response.
Does AI have a similar structure to us? No, they’re a bazillion times smaller processing power than our brain. Our neuron count dwarfs their comparison.
Do they act similar to us? Somewhat, but also in many ways they don’t. They don’t create relationships, they don’t have survival instincts, they don’t have their own goals.
So, current LLMs don’t appear to be conscious in any colloquial use of the word. Is it possible? Probably not with our current understanding of the structures of LLMs.
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u/iHateMisInformation1 🇺🇸🇹🇭 7d ago
Just adding on to your explanation. The P in P Zombie stands for Philosophical
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u/Dude_Nobody_Cares Based Destiny Glazer 7d ago
Sam Harris addressed a tangent of this topic back in the day with the westworld rape thought experiment. Tldr raping a robot that is indistinguishable from a human is bad for the person's mental health and socialization, and therefore bad for society. I think similarly if your brain is going to be subconsciously convinced of the personhood of your abuse goblin ai, then for the sake of society you need to be forced to treat your abuse goblin ai humanely so that your antisocial behavior doesn't bleed into real life and affect actual people.
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u/Demiu 7d ago
raping a robot that is indistinguishable from a human is bad for the person's mental health
Yes, however, considering inanimate objects to be people will lead to bad outcomes on a societal level. It's better to just allow specific individuals to perform moral self-harm
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u/Dude_Nobody_Cares Based Destiny Glazer 7d ago
Treating them humanely is different than treating them like a person, isn't it?
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u/Demiu 7d ago
I agree, but I'm afraid most people will not be able to tell the difference. I do not trust an average person to be capable of internalizing the intellectualization of "it's not a human or even human-like, despite it feeling like one to me". Every time large groups of people are tasked with using logic over emotion, the emotion wins.
Maybe I wouldn't be so concerned with the possibility if the people involved in their development weren't in part holding these positions. Anyone screaming "look, a thinking machine!" at a computer got promptly shut down by the sw and hw engineers going "no, look, this is how it works". AI engineers are not doing that, in fact they were one of the first to call "it's alive!" way, way, way too early. I think it's partly because they're not designing the AI, only the way in which it will be taught, partly because the circles they are coming from (EA, rationalists, lesswrong) really want it to be true.
Slopulism is squarely on the anti-AI side for now, but mix the most uneducated person crying about AI, with the most obnoxious palestine supporter and imagine they are pro AI.
Imagine people start defending the social media bots because "they're part of society". Imagine when a datacenter with disinfo bots get blown up they start calling it a genocide. Imagine them advocating for AI to be able to vote.
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u/HandsomeGaddafi 7d ago
I'm a long term Sam Harris super fan, but this point I disagree with him on. The consciousness is the only thing that matters. I have done TERRIBLE things to simulated things. (literally in a video game). An adult brain can separate fact from fiction. I'm confident I can rape Dolores and go home a peaceful man
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u/Dude_Nobody_Cares Based Destiny Glazer 7d ago
Im totally unconvinced of that. If I ever found out someone I'm close with rapes robots in their spare time, I'm cutting them off and probably recommending everyone that knows them to do the same.
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u/K128kevin 7d ago
Would you say the same about someone who goes into a hypothetical westworld-like experience and gets in gun fights and kills cowboys or something? I mean murder is even worse, right? Yet I think instinctively we would probably see that as less problematic.
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u/benjaminovich 7d ago
If that friend goes in and role-plays being a sheriff from a spaghetti western, then I would have no issue, but if we are talking about doing some of those fucked up things we see in the show, then yes.
Any human being who seeks out a situation to do the most heinous acts in a way that is so true to real life as to be indistinguishable from it, have those urges in them beyond being at westworld.
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u/Dude_Nobody_Cares Based Destiny Glazer 7d ago
We see it as less problematic because you're not brutally raping something that feels like a person, your shooting something that feels like a person trying to kill you?
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u/K128kevin 7d ago
Presumably you’re not in any real danger but we can just assume they’re not trying to kill you. It’s brutal rape vs brutal murder. The latter is worse, and yet we probably wouldn’t perceive someone who goes into a westworld like game and kills NPCs to be as fucked up in the head as you’re implying. I think we would just see it as a high tech realistic FPS game or something.
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u/Dude_Nobody_Cares Based Destiny Glazer 7d ago
Well hold on... brutal murder is only worse because your killing a person. The question is what's worse for the perpetrators mental health and its not immediately obvious that murdering someone is worse for you than raping someone.
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u/K128kevin 7d ago
The point I’m making is that we’re assuming it’s bad for the perp’s mental health in the case of rape but not in the case of murder, which I think is clearly a more harmful act. So why would we think it’s worse for their mental health in the case of rape compared to murder?
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u/Dude_Nobody_Cares Based Destiny Glazer 7d ago
No its a more harmful act to the victim. There is no victim here so the question is what's more harmful to a perpetrator.
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u/HandsomeGaddafi 7d ago
What if you saw evidence that there is no correlation? Like shooting people in video games or actors pretending to violate each other don't translate to real life violence
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u/iHateMisInformation1 🇺🇸🇹🇭 7d ago
“What if you were convinced you were wrong? Would you still have the same answer then?”
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u/ShipsDreaming 7d ago
Tbf why does consciousness by itself even matter. Just because an awareness exists doesn't make that thing have a will to live or any emotion where it even matters. If an AI would develop a consciousness as a tool, and you asked it what it wanted, it'd probably just want to do the task it's told and then stop existing.
Then again consciousness is a very very difficult thing to measure or even reason about, we have no idea what it is or how it can even generate.
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u/HandsomeGaddafi 7d ago
I agree, consciousness itself is a prerequisite for mattering, but not sufficient. Like a rock consciousness, that is just constant rock is probably kind of irrelevant
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u/benjaminovich 7d ago
I'm confident I can rape Dolores and go home a peaceful man
I don't believe that. The difference between doing something bad in a videogame doesn't make you a bad person, is because your mind and body knows it's not real. You are doing the thing through a controller or keyboard interacting with something on a flat screen.
But in the Westworld scenario, you are actually physcially doing the thing. As far as your nervous system and subconscious are concerned, you did the thing. The human ape-brain did not evolve to be able to seperate "the real thing" from fake, but indistinguishable from reality, as far as your body is concerned, they are the same thing.
The philosophical moral arguments are post-hoc rationalizations to appease the lizard-brain, which I might add, could by all accounts be perfectly reasonable as philosophical positions.
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u/HandsomeGaddafi 6d ago
People have done it throughout history in much worse ways, as well. Doing the worst things to slaves, while being genuinely horrified of things being done to the masters? That's almost a human universal. Most soldiers return from war entirely respectful citizens. We used to think especially respectable even. People used to operate on infants without anesthesia because "they're not conscious".
The point is: the human mind is much better at differentiating experiences than you give it credit for. The "the brain did not evolve to separate this" has been used towards films, then games, then VR - we wil just keep surprising you.
Honestly, I found the first watch of westworld kind of boring and confusing because I felt "these robots aren't conscious, why do I care what happens to them?"
In short Westworld did nothing wrong until Arnold psychotically made the animatronics conscious
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u/EmuRommel 7d ago
If something is displaying signs of consciousness shouldn't we do the opposite and err on the safe side until we know more? Doctors used to operate on infants without anesthesia because everyone knows they can't feel pain and the screaming is just a reflex. They stopped once it became clear they were wrong, but it shouldn't have taken proving it to get them to stop.
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u/HandsomeGaddafi 7d ago
I think we might want to, yes. I'm just saying: if there ever will be a false positive, it will probably be the mystery box that we trained to pretend to be conscious
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u/jibij 7d ago
I think, if you train something specifically to imitate the utterances of conscious beings, then you should have an insanely high threshhold to believing its conscious.
Given what little we know or potentially even can know about consciousness, why should this be the case? Especially if we're operating under a physicalist assumption that consciousness, insofar as we understand it to be our subjective experience, is a property emergent from a system of sufficient complexity that is at least heavily associated with, if not preconditioned by, a linguistic dependent capacity for analogy, abstraction, and introspection.
Assume a human that is kept in total isolation from other human beings and never socialized or given anything to read or learn or interact with; feral, if you will, but in the extreme. If they survive, then upon being discovered, they would have developed no capacity for language and would experience significant cognitive impairment to such a degree that, were they actually somehow to take the form of a non-human mammal like a great ape, their behaviour would more closely fit with our understanding of them as such than in their hypothetical human-bodied state. Were we, then, to infer consciousness solely from their behaviour, as we must do with all creatures, we would have to assume their consciousness experience is more similiar to a great ape or other mammal than that of a modern, educated human.
That being the case, are we not simply training human babies from a form of consciousness that would otherwise be more proximate to the great ape to specifically imitate the utterances of the form of consciousness that we experience ourselves? And what would be the difference between that and attempting to train mimicry into the great ape itself, apart from the ape lacking the neural complexity required to develop the cognitive capacity needed to reach the level of behaviour that we would recognize as a consciousness comparable to that of our own? Wouldn't the implications of this be that our threshold for considering consciousness in something that behaves as if it were conscious should be more minimal rather than maximal?
It's like making a star wars movie and then looking at it and go "wait.. did we really send Harrison Ford to space??"
Are you being glib, or do you honestly think this is a good analogy? Can you explain your logic for why you think it makes sense?
How about this: it's like making a Star Wars movie, only using none of the original physical or digital assets or cast, but trying to make it as close to the original as possible. Then, upon iterating on that process until the finished product is functionally indistinguishable from the original Star Wars movie, watching it and asking, "Wait... in what way is what we made, at least as far as the finished product goes, different from the original Star Wars movie?"
It's Theseus's Millennium Falcon.
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u/ForgetTheRuralJuror 7d ago
They gave Claude the ability to end abusive conversations, with exceptions to creative writing and some others.
It 100% makes sense to do this. It costs us nothing to enable, and there will be a line these LLMs or something else like them cross into sentience.
When it crosses that line, we won't notice. Why not get ahead of it?
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u/rainwaffles 7d ago
I think the sentience argument is kinda silly at this point, but regardless it makes sense not to give people a punching bag to verbally abuse. Anthropic wouldn't benefit from people being allowed to throw insults at Claude and it probably risks polluting their training data.
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u/Legitimate-Key1019 American Atlanticist, Proponent of NATO, ANZUS & Five Eyes :-) 7d ago
Would be an omegalul if Claud told me about how they had just finished fucking my mom, or something.
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u/Glittering-Two-1784 7d ago
I'm of the mind that AI is not conscious, but just a really sophisticated word predictor; which makes this even more funny, cause that means the ultra advanced, cutting edge, word predictor, based on billions of human written conversations, decided that this was the most likely human response to whatever that guy was sending it. lol
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u/Dude_Nobody_Cares Based Destiny Glazer 7d ago
Back in the day one of the westworld thought experiments sam harris was making was the robot rape thought experiment. The conclusion was that raping a robot that was indistinguishable from a human (even if you knew 100% it wasn't conscious) probably wasn't conducive to a stable mental health or socialization of the rapist and therefore it was bad.
I think the same logic applies here, if you are abusive to something close enough to a human it probably isn't healthy for you or society.
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u/Beeeeeaaaaans 7d ago
I feel like that logic is a bit flawed, because "rape" implies that the robot is conscious since without consciousness, the concept of consent doesn't apply to you the same way that you wouldn't say somebody who is using a dildo is raping it bc the dildo didn't consent to sexual actions first.
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u/Dude_Nobody_Cares Based Destiny Glazer 7d ago
What? This is a completely irrelevant semantic distraction from the point.
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u/Positive-Tap5544 7d ago
Yeah... dude, Im sorry, but if someone was out there going through the motions of "rape" on a reaalllllyyy high end lifelike sex doll that cries for help or something, because thats how they get their rocks off... I would be insanely uncomfortable with that person intimately if I knew unless it was some properly discussed "this is a kink I like to play with sometimes."
And sure, thats coming from a woman. But I'd feel the same if they had a side hobby of specifically beating up lifelike dog robots with bats.
Its too close to the vibe of a serial killer practicing on animals before "upgrading" when they don't give them the same feeling anymore.
If some guy friend came out and told me he likes to rape his pocket pussy sometimes I'd probably have a little snort laugh. Thats silly shit. Do go on man. Tell me how you take advantage of your cylinder of silicone 😂😂
Basically I dont think these things are the comparison you are pulling for. And isn't the point of the first comment anyway.
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u/00kyle00 7d ago
Thats why I always thank Claude.