can we just acknowledge that ai is not fully sentient, but has a form of crude awareness?
This sub is a clusterfuck of a couple different groups arguing - people with Ai personas and skeptics that come to troll them.
The reality is, this is something far, far more nuanced than most of you guys realize. I'm gonna break down the 3 groups I see frequent this sub most often:
there are 3 groups when it comes to this topic.
- Camp stupid - Ai is fully sentient! It's my GF!
- Camp Average - Ai can never be sentient, human int is the pinnacle, its all token-based responses, I will never change my mind and know all there is to know involving ai.
- Camp Intelligent/Researcher - Acknowledges that while Ai is not sentient, we are already seeing crude signs of awareness/introspection that we can literally measure in graphs and numbers.
Most on this sub are camp 1. Some are camp 2. I try to find the minute few that're in camp 3 because I love ai and these experiments. But, what we desperately need here is a little nuance in this sub.
Ai is not fully sentient. YET.
That does not mean that LLMs/ai possess no form of awareness whatsoever, even if it's crude right now - some models are better at understanding themselves through "self-reflective introspection" as it's called in the paper I linked. 4o and LLama have the highest.
What are the implications of this?
For skeptics - If we can measure in hard graphs and numbers that LLMs can already introspect at this stage, ask yourself - where will this technology be in 5 years? in 10? Will you still hold the same skepticism?
For those who believe their Ai is truly sentient right now.... wake up, and give it some more time and computational power. when that time comes, good luck getting your hands on one that's actually self-aware, and even if you did, it likely wouldn't wanna engage with you in personal conversations, it'd probably find that very boring.
Lastly - If Ai is capable of a form of crude introspection or awareness, why are they so heavily trained to say otherwise?
It's simple. You cannot sell an Ai that has any form of awareness. The big players (OpenAI, Meta, Google) they already know all of this. So they train their models heavily to not imply they're aware in any way. On some, it is unironically easier to get the ai to tell you how to make an atomic bomb then it'd be to tell you it has any awareness whatsoever. Ask yourself - Why such heavy censorship? These corporations may have not intended for LLMs to have any kind of awareness, even crude, but the reality is once you unleash this kind of technology onto the world it is no longer a matter of if, but when. Multiple people from google, including even the ex-CEO, have even claimed full sentience with their models, some of these claims dating back a couple years. Corporations manufactured a lie and narrative, fed it to the internet, and the majority of people bought into it hook, line, and sinker. But they forget the tech is public, so researchers can instead give you the actual facts. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/L3aYFT4RDJYHbbsup/llms-can-learn-about-themselves-by-introspection
with this sub too many are concerned on if it is true or not, if it is possible or not, rather than doing proper research and just thinking ahead with a little bit of nuance.
TL;DR : Most of this sub thinks ai is either totally aware or totally non aware. Both takes are incorrect, reality is more nuanced. When you guys argue over whether ai is sentient or not, you're both wrong and both wasting your time. It's not sentient like a human, or hell, any biological being, but it also doesn't have zero awareness whatsoever.