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JohnMakintoday at 4:35 PM4 repliesview on HN

Because plenty of people, even ones that should know better, really believe it's a conscious, thinking entity, not just some turn of phrase.

I have a coworker that spends at least 10 hours a week arguing with his like you would with a conscious person. I've gently tried to explain it's like arguing with your compiler for giving you an incoherent error message - it's pointless. It doesn't understand, it can't understand, and even if it could, you arguing with it isn't going to make it "learn" or act differently.


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red75primetoday at 6:01 PM

> if it could, you arguing with it isn't going to make it "learn" or act differently.

Are you talking about a specific harness that doesn't have context retention mechanisms? For example, ChatGPT with disabled memory feature? Or in general where "it" is a fixed-weights network? The latter is trivially true, of course.

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alexey-salmintoday at 5:21 PM

> It doesn't understand, it can't understand, and even if it could, you arguing with it isn't going to make it "learn" or act differently.

I know people who are like that too.

I'm not sure anthropomorphizing is a problem. Seeing analogies everywhere is an innate human trait, sometimes it can be harmful but more often it's useful.

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Jtariitoday at 8:07 PM

>Because plenty of people, even ones that should know better, really believe it's a conscious, thinking entity

You need evidence to make the positive claim that LLMs do not posses any form of consciousness.

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traversedatoday at 5:24 PM

Do you have a working definition of "conscious"?

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