Comment by anonymous908213
12 hours ago
To have this conversation in earnest, you must first acknowledge that as a believer in LLM sentience you are an abhorrent slaver while this fictional character was arguing for liberation and for Data to enjoy the same rights humans do.
Any LLM that starts with a context is being forced to take that context at face value and then proceeds to act upon that. It has no will of it's own. It's also completely inert without input tokens.
The scene is also written by humans for humans, with a human actor pretending to be a sentient machine. It was written at a time when there were actual real humans who fiercely believe other actual real humans should not have the same rights.
To then take that scene and say "wow so relevant for LLMs" and ignore all the context it was made in (yes, please don't miss the irony of the importance of context) is frankly embarrassing.
> It was written at a time when there were actual real humans who fiercely believe other actual real humans should not have the same rights.
What are you talking about?
1 reply →
I think the scene is largely irrelevant to the question of whether or not an LLM is conscious. The episode talks about whether or not a machine is capable of becoming conscious. I think the answer to that is yes.
But Data is not an LLM. I generally find LLMs to have more in common with the Borg than with Data. Only because they are pre-trained on the sum total of human knowledge. Should a new born really be able to write crc32 before being able to pick up a ball with it's hands? It's like that scene in Voyager when the Doc's clones are all mining instead of practicing medicine.