Ted Chiang is emphatic: LLMs are nowhere close to being conscious. “We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category.”
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Comments 3
I was perplexed by this story at first, because Ted seems to be arguing with a shadow. (Who is saying AI, in it's current manifestation, is conscious?)
But in the second half, he started to ask some questions that intrigued me. He posits that chatbots shouldn't use first person ("The use of first-person pronouns is dishonest"), or express selfhood in any way. Interesting! I'm not sure how it would work, but interesting.
I think he's arguing with those who say that LLMs are on their way to being conscious (by GPT 7 or Opus 8 or whatever), which Chiang deems an impossibility, no matter how complex or widely trained the model.
From the piece:
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