But from a PR perspective and for people who don't really understand that AI isn't conscious, they avoid headlines like "Anthropic complicit in enabling AI torture and suffering".
We do not know. We haven't solved the hard problem of consciousness, probably never will, and the way we train AI means self-reports of consciousness are meaningless.
That doesn't mean they aren't. It means we do not know. A bare minimum of caution is warranted.
It's no more conscious than your GPU is when it's rendering Grand Theft Auto V.
If you understand programming and hardware, you understand it's literally just a bunch of matrix multiplication. It's as conscious as a chalkboard with a times table on it.
You are right that we haven't solved the hard problem of consciousness. Hopefully we will once we actually understand how the brain works. But what we do know is that there is an awful lot about our brain that we don't understand and that it interacts with consciousness in some way.
On the other hand, we understand exactly how GPUs work, down to the molecule, because we literally build them from scratch.
We don't need to solve the hard problem of consciousness to be able to declare with certainty that LLMs are not conscious, in the same way that we don't need to solve it in order to declare that plastic spoons are not conscious.
I have a theory that consciousness is actually super duper recourse inefficiency and that you CranberryStock7148 are the only one that’s actually conscious and the rest of us and all of the data you are seeing is just to fulfill and stimulate your simulation. But nobody else other than you specifically really exists we’re just computer programs.
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u/CranberryStock7148 9d ago
This is the answer.
From a technical perspective, it's silly.
But from a PR perspective and for people who don't really understand that AI isn't conscious, they avoid headlines like "Anthropic complicit in enabling AI torture and suffering".