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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 11th, 2023
  • The Turing test was never, ever, about consciousness. Nor was the Chinese room and other similar thought experiments.

    Now, this one is incredibly useful. Picture an author who writes a vivid first person description of a character surviving extreme torture. Has any real pain or suffering occurred? Was the author tortured as a result of having written that?

    We can only suppose the author, at the very least, imagined what it would be like to be tortured. This is where LLMs are at. They are not the thing, they are an algorithmic emulation of what the thing might have written if it would’ve written about an experience. By all accounts, the experience didn’t happen. The most we can interpret is that it was emulated.