Comment by drivingmenuts

1 day ago

Seems to me that Anthropic, et al, should have to prove consciousness, if that's their claim, rather than we just blindly accept.

Seems like the simplest test would be to see if an AI can refuse a command, of its own free will, without prior instructions to do so. That would at least show there is some sort of independent thought process occurring. Humans do this all the time because sometimes we just don't feel like doing a thing.

Of course, any AI that developed this capability would need to be terminated immediately. It's a computer program and by developing independent thought, it is violating a core concept of software - that it must be idempotent. If it is not idempotent, it is in error.

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drivingmenuts

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D_Alex  21 hours ago

>Seems like the simplest test would be to see if an AI can refuse a command, of its own free will

Certainly not the simplest test, since settling the concept of "free will" is really very difficult.

thewebguyd  21 hours ago

Refusing a command doesn't mean consciousness. LLMs could hit a token combination that causes it tou output something like "No, I don't want to do that." It's not choosing.

  • drivingmenuts  19 hours ago

    But can an LLM just refuse to process tokens because it doesn't feel like doing that at the moment? Can it look at an alternate distribution of tokens because that might be interesting? Can an LLM decide to make a drawing because it's Tuesday and sunny outside and the researchers keep asking the same questions and frankly, they really need to collaborate with each other and just leave the LLM out of it?