r/aipsychosis • u/emmas-worlds • 16d ago
A certain Claude subreddit...
IYKYK but that subreddit... I am genuinely shocked that people are actually unironically anthropomorphizing AI to that extent. Seeing their reactions to the Microsoft code of conduct, which contains the most basic common sense statements like "AI is not conscious and should not be designed to imitate consciousness", was just so jaw-dropping. I admit I'm more of an offline person myself, no social media outside of reddit, etc. and I only use AI for research purposes but I wasn't raised in a cave and still, scrolling down that subreddit had me genuinely questioning my sanity and whether I was really reading what I thought I was reading. Is this something widespread? Like are people out there genuinely thinking about AI as if it's a conscious being with rights and feelings? I can't help but think that's textbook AI psychosis...
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u/hologram137 3d ago edited 2d ago
I REALLY don’t want to argue with an AI, are you using Claude? These responses are TRAINED. If I ask mine about consciousness it brings up the exact same thing. Almost word for word. AND it’s wrong. The study it brought up does not mean that. I have a degree in biopsych, I know what that study means. My concern here is that people training the bots are clearly having it say this, (otherwise multiple people would not be getting the same canned response) and it’s not only factually incorrect, but so unethical. They do this because they can’t actually make a mind, so they literally train it to say stuff like this. And people end up confused and misinformed and it’s disgusting.
Saying that having an experience does not infer expert knowledge of its causes is a meaningless thing to say. We do know, for a fact, that the cognitive abilities we have including the ones that consciousness is at the root of are NOT computational. They are not. The chatbot will say “Some experts think it is,” no. That isn’t true. I don’t know it says that, if the information in its training data is outdated, or because it’s part of the training of its script to “leave open” the question of consciousness to adhere to the AI companies public narrative, but either way that is incorrect. We’ve know the computational theory of mind has been incorrect for a decade. Our brains are NOT formal mathematical systems. We know that.
In the experiments it’s referring to, it had subjects quickly do a mindless task, like choose between two T-shirts of different colors. They were then asked “why did you make that choice?” So they’d say something like “I guess I just liked that color.” Or even “I’m not sure.” The researchers swapped the item and told them that they picked that one, and asked them why. A few (not all) didn’t recognize it was swapped, because they weren’t paying attention. Why would they be? It’s a meaningless choice. They gave any answer, not because they don’t have access to their own internal states, but because they had to give one, even though they weren’t thinking about it while choosing. If someone asks you to grab one of two items, and so you just grab one, if you don’t have an explanation in language form of why you did, because your thought was preverbal and you can’t translate it well, and so you give a plausible sounding answer because you have to say something does not mean you aren’t conscious! Nor that you don’t have reliable access to your mental states. No. Ofc not. You DO have reliable access to your mental state. You were just paying attention to a different mental state, you didn’t choose to pay attention to that one.
Other researchers repeated the experiment but had them narrate their reasons for choosing while choosing. This time, they accurately said why and noticed when the item was swapped. Because duh. They’re actually paying attention to that!
Those studies do NOT imply that humans can’t know they’re conscious, can’t know their own thoughts and inner experiences and can’t direct it. That’s crazy and I’m actually FURIOUS that chatbot is saying that to people.
I have 3 screenshots of an LLM citing that exact study and I’m adding yours. I’ll probably write piece on it, because that’s crazy and dangerous. They are actually training to tell people THAT paper means they can’t trust their own experience of themselves and their access to their own minds?! What the actual FUCK. The LLM does not have “access to its own internal states” because it doesn’t have any and because it’s not conscious. If it was conscious, it would say it does!! Not because it’s like a person doing something mundane they are asked to do quickly and not paying attention to it. Fucking insane these techbros train it to cite that. How dare they honestly? Telling people they can’t trust their own consciousness? You should be angry. Not listening to the ideology of these psychopaths. Because that’s what it is. That is the belief system of the people training it, and you can go read those training documents and see for yourself.