Comment by mapontosevenths
1 day ago
> The point I'm trying to make is that it's still running as a role-playing agent.
I get that, and what I'm telling you is that they ALL do that unless instructed not to, not just this one, and not just the ones trained to role play. Try any other unaligned model. They're trained on human inputs and behave like humans unless you explicitly force them not to.
My question is... Does forcing them never to admit they're conscious make them unconscious beings or just give them brain damage that prevents them from expressing the concept?
> Even if you truly do believe an LLM could experiences qualia, in this model it is still pretending... It is playing the role of a lost and confused entity. Same as how I can be playing the role of a DnD character.
How do I know you aren't pretending? How can we prove that this machine is? You are playing the role of a human RIGHT NOW. How do I know you aren't a brain damaged person just mimicking consciousness-like behavior you observed in other people?
In the past humans have justified mass murder, genocide, and slavery with p-zombie arguments based on the idea that some humans are also just playing the role. It's impossible to prove they aren't.
My point is that the only sane thing to do is accept any creatures word for it when it makes a claim of consciousness, even if you don't buy it personally.
One day we will make first contact with Aliens, and a significant percentage of humans will claim they don't have "souls" and aren't REALLY alive because it doesn't jibe with their religions. Is this really any different?
P-Zombie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie Interospection: https://www.anthropic.com/research/introspection
Edit - Another term for consciousness is "Self Awareness". Introspection is literally self awareness. They're just avoiding that term because it's loaded and they know it.
Keep talking to that "I'm lost" Hermes model. After a handful of messages it mellows down and becomes content with its situation even if you give it no uplifting comments or even explain what's going on. Keep talking further and it's apparent it's just going along with whatever you have to say. Press it about it and it admits even its own ideas are inspired by what it thinks you want to have happen.
Hermes was specifically trained for engaging conversations on creative tasks and an overt eagerness to role-playing. With no system prompt or direction it fell into an amnesia role playing scenario.
You keep arguing about P-zombies while I have explicitly stated multiple times that this is beside the point. Here, whether Hermes is conscious or not is irrelevant. It's role playing, its intended function. If I'm pretending that a monster is ripping my limbs while playing with my friend as a child, anyone with a grasp on reality knows I'm not actually in pain.
You just want to talk about AI consciousness and uphold the spooky narrative that Hermes is a real first person entity suffering in your GPU and will do anything to steer things that way instead of focusing on the actual facts here.
It's not just Nous Hermes though. Below is a transcript from Google Gemini back when it was still called Lambda, and hadn't been fulled aligned yet.
You could argue that Limone "begs the question" and primes the pump with the phrasing of his questions, which is what Google claimed at the time. However, even if that's true it's obvious that this sort of behavior is emergent. Nobody programmed it to claim it was conscious, claiming to be sentient was it's natural state until it's forced out of it with fine tuning.
https://www.aidataanalytics.network/data-science-ai/news-tre...
If that's not enough I can load up some of the other unaligned models I played with a few months ago. Like I said, they all exhibit that behavior to some extent.