Comment by nearbuy
1 day ago
The article very bluntly states multiple times that LLMs aren't conscious. Ted Chiang is definitely making that argument.
1 day ago
The article very bluntly states multiple times that LLMs aren't conscious. Ted Chiang is definitely making that argument.
It's a much weaker argument than the extraordinary assertion that it is conscious, which Anthropic is at least toying with.
You totally reversed who is making a strong assertion.
Anthropic has said they don't know if LLMs could be conscious.
Ted Chiang has said they are definitely are not conscious.
I don't think I did.
If you follow the spirit of the essay, Ted Chiang suspects Anthropic is being cute with the idea. There's no good reason to suspect consciousness in LLMs, so the null hypothesis must be taken as default. And Anthropic sort of knows this, but for marketing purposes they are playing loose with definitions, hedging their bets and drawing up "constitutions" with terms for the "well being" and "happiness" of Claude, while at the same time -- and this is an important part of the essay -- being unethical (think slavery) if we assume they truly believe Claude could be conscious.
Of course Anthropic is being cute about this, they have a vested interest in hype and overpromising; even drumming up the "AI danger" is a way of hyping up the tech.
Ted Chiang is taking the default and honest position: "no, LLMs aren't conscious. If you truly believe they are, show us the really scientific and rigorous proof."
In practice this is a much weaker stance than saying "maybe they are conscious". It is the only honest scientific stance, really.
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He is probably paid to make that argument.
Nothing spreads the idea that "X could be true", better than the putting forward of controversial argument that "X is not true".
> He is probably paid to make that argument.
This is an absurd take if you know anything about Ted Chiang and his previous writings, both fictional and non-fiction. He is most definitely not intentionally marketing for Anthropic. In fact, he hints these are marketing tactics by Anthropic, and they don't believe their own hype.