Comment by anonym29
4 hours ago
>People have killed themselves or others due to conversations they had with LLMs, but those are just the extreme cases. Most schizophrenics don't commit suicide or kill others, they are mentally ill nonetheless.
Do you think the kind of person who was already psychologically unhinged enough to kill themselves or another person because a chatbot told them to would be completely harmless and totally safe if only chatbots had never been invented? Or is it possible that close to all of the risk posed by this person comes from the person's mental illness, and not the pixels on the screen they're looking at?
Chatbots don't make people murderous any more than "satanic music", violent video games, or cannabis do. LLMs are just the latest entry on a list of hysterical moral panics that conflate coincidence with causation.
You're the one attributing culpability to the chat bot, not me. It's a pile of tensor math, it cannot itself be held accountable.
Those people anthropomorphized the chat bot and used it as justification for their actions, just as a schizophrenic justifies their actions with the voices in their head.
If you anthropomorphize the chat bot, you're validating their delusions. They are mentally ill.
I'm not anthropomorphizing them, to be clear, my position has been and remains that we cannot rule out consciousness; not that they are conscious.
Regardless, this is still missing my main point. Hypothetically, if you became convinced that a chatbot you were talking to definitely was 100% conscious, and it told you to murder someone, would you go commit murder? Of course not. The chatbot does not cause murders; regardless of whether or not you are conscious. The voices in the head of the schizophrenic do not cause murders either. Those voices do not really exist, they are not real entities. The cause of the murder is the mental illness, not the LLM or the voices that tell someone to commit the murder.
I think we're in agreement here and just coming at it from different directions.
I don't want to ban LLMs, I don't blame them for the actions of crazy people, I don't even want to regulate them in any major way related to this particular issue.
Even on the subject if they are or not conscious my position as changed from "no" to "I don't care either way" awhile ago.
The problem is specifically with anthropomorphizing them. To push the idea that they are "as if human", which is what this consciousness discussion will inevitably lead to.
An imaginary perfect computer simulation of my dead father is not my father, it is a computer simulation. It will never be anything but.