Comment by Davidzheng
2 days ago
I disagree with this take. They are designed to predict human behavior in text. Unless consciousness serves no purpose for us to function, it will be helpful for the AI to emulate it. so I believe almost certainly it's emulated to some degree. which I think means it has to be somewhat conscious (it has to be a sliding scale anyhow considering the range of living organisms)
> They are designed to predict human behavior in text
At best you can say they are designed to predict sequences of text that resemble human writing, but it's definitely wrong to say that they are designed to "predict human behavior" in any way.
> Unless consciousness serves no purpose for us to function, it will be helpful for the AI to emulate it
Let's assume it does. It does not follow logically that because it serves a function in humans that it serves a function in language models.
Given we don't understand consciousness, nor the internal workings of these models, the fact that their externally-observable behavior displays qualities we've only previously observed in other conscious beings is a reason to be real careful. What is it that you'd expect to see, which you currently don't see, in a world where some model was in fact conscious during inference?
> Given we don't understand consciousness, nor the internal workings of these models, the fact that their externally-observable behavior displays qualities we've only previously observed in other conscious beings is a reason to be real careful
It doesn't follow logically that because we don't understand two things we should then conclude that there is a connection between them.
> What is it that you'd expect to see, which you currently don't see, in a world where some model was in fact conscious during inference?
There's no observable behavior that would make me think they're conscious because again, there's simply no reason they need to be.
We have reason to assume consciousness exists because it serves some purpose in our evolutionary history, like pain, fear, hunger, love and every other biological function that simply don't exist in computers. The idea doesn't really make any sense when you think about it.
If GPT-5 is conscious, why not GPT-1? Why not all the other extremely informationally complex systems in computers and nature? If you're of the belief that many non-living conscious systems probably exist all around us then I'm fine with the conclusion that LLMs might also be conscious, but short of that there's just no reason to think they are.
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I mean if you have human without consciousness (if that is even possible) behaving in a statistically different distribution in text vs with. The machine will eventually be in distribution of the former from the latter because the text it's trained on is of the former category. So it serves a "function" in the LLM to minimize loss to approximate the former distribution.
Also I find it somewhat emotional distinction to write "predict sequences of text that resemble human writing" instead of "predict human writing". They are designed to predict (at least in pretraining) human writing for the most part. They may fail at the task, and what they produce is a text which resemble human writing. But their task is not to resemble human writing. Their task is to "predict human writing". Probably a meaningless distinction, but I find it somewhat detracts from logically arguments to have emotional responses against similarities of machines and humans.
> I mean if you have human without consciousness (if that is even possible) behaving in a statistically different distribution in text vs with. The machine will eventually be in distribution of the former from the latter because the text it's trained on is of the former category. So it serves a "function" in the LLM to minimize loss to approximate the former distribution.
Sorry, I'm not following exactly what you're getting at here, do you mind rephrasing it?
> Also I find it somewhat emotional distinction to write "predict sequences of text that resemble human writing" instead of "predict human writing"
I don't know what you mean by emotional distinction. Either way, my point is that LLMs aren't models of humans, they're models of text, and that's obvious when the statistical power of the model necessarily fails at some point between model size and the length of the sequence it produces. For GPT-1 that sequence is only a few words, for GPT-5 it's a few dozen pages, but fundamentally we're talking about systems that have almost zero resemblance to actual human minds.
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