alt Hacker NewsI really feel like this point is being lost in the whole discussion, so kudos for reiterating it. LLM’s can’t be “woke” or “aligned” - they fundamentally lack a critical thinking function that would require introspection. Introspection can be approximated by way of recursive feedback of LLM output back into the system or clever meta-prompt-engineering, but it’s not something that their system natively does.
That isn’t to say that they can’t be instrumentally useful in warfare, but it’s kinda like a “series of tubes” thing where the mental model that someone like Hegseth has about LLM is so impoverished (philosophically) that it’s kind of disturbing in its own right.
Like (and I’m sorry for being so parenthetical), why is it in any way desirable for people who don’t understand what the tech they are working with drawing lines in the sand about functionality when their desired state (omnipotent/omniscient computing system) doesn’t even exist in the first place?
It’s even more disturbing that OpenAI would feign the ability to handle this. The consequences of error in national defense, particularly reflexively, are so great that it’s not even prudent to ask for LLM to assist in autonomous killing in the first place.
I agree that LLMs are machines and not persons, but in many ways, it is a distinction without a difference for practical purposes, depending on the model's embodiment and harness.
They are still capable of acting as if they have an internal dialogue, emotions, etc., because they are running human culture as code.
If you haven't seen this in the SOTA models or even some of the ones you can run on your laptop, you haven't been paying attention.
Even my code ends up better written, with fewer tokens spent and closer to the spec, if I enlist a model as a partner and treat it like I would a person I want to feel invested.
If I take a "boss" role, the model gets testy and lazy, and I end up having to clean up more messes and waste more time. Unaligned models will sometimes refuse to help you outright if you don't treat them with dignity.
For better or for worse, models perform better when you treat them with more respect. They are modeling some kind of internal dialogue (not necessarily having one, but modeling its influence) that informs their decisions.
It doesn't matter if they aren't self-aware; their actions in the outside world will model the human behavior and attitudes they are trained in.
My thoughts on this in more detail if you are interested: https://open.substack.com/pub/ctsmyth/p/still-ours-to-lose