Ah but have you tried burning a few trillion dollars in front of the painting? That might make a difference!

I had a poster in ‘86 that I wanted to come alive.

Thank you for calling it an LLM.

As long as we can't even define sapience in biological life, where it resides and how it works, it's pointless to try and apply those terms to AI. We don't know how natural intelligence works, so using what little we know about it to define something completely different is counterintuitive.

Painting?

"LLMs are a blurry JPEG of the web" - unknown (I've heard it as an unattributed quote)

The example I gave my wife was "expecting General AI from the current LLM models, is like teaching a dog to roll over and expecting that, with a year of intense training, the dog will graduate from law school"

We don't know how consciousness arises, and digital neural networks seem like decent enough approximations of their biological counterparts to warrant caution. There are huge economic and ethical incentives to deny consciousness in non-humans. We do the same with animals to justify murdering them for our personal benefit.
We cannot know who or what possesses consciousness. We struggle to even define it.

Except ... being alive is well defined. But consciousness is not. And we do not even know where it comes from.

Remember when passing the Turing Test was like a big deal? And then it happened. And now we have things like this:

Stanford researchers reported that ChatGPT passes the test; they found that ChatGPT-4 "passes a rigorous Turing test, diverging from average human behavior chiefly to be more cooperative"

The best way to differentiate computers to people is we haven't taught AI to be an asshole all the time. Maybe it's a good thing they aren't like us.

I don't expect it. I'm going to talk to the AI and nothing else until my psychosis hallucinates it.

I can define "LLM", "a painting", and "alive". Those definitions don't require assumptions or gut feelings. We could easily come up with a set of questions and an answer key that will tell you if a particular thing is an LLM or a painting and whether or not it's alive.

I'm not aware of any such definition of conscious, nor am I aware of any universal tests of consciousness. Without that definition, it's like Ebert claiming that, "Video games can never be art".

People used to talk about the idea of uploading your consciousness to a computer to achieve immortality. But nowadays I don't think anyone would trust it. You could tell me my consciousness was uploaded and show me a version of me that was indistinguishable from myself in every way, but I still wouldn't believe it experiences or feels anything as I do, even though it claims to do so. Especially if it's based on an LLM, since they are superficial imitations by design.

The first life did not possess a sentient consciousness. Yet here you are reading this now. No one even tried to direct that. Quite the opposite, everything has been trying to kill you from the very start.

It's achieveable if enough alcohol is added to the subject looking at the said painting. And with some exotic chemistry they may even start to taste or hear the colors.

Good showering!

The Eliza effect

I heard someone describe LLMs as "a magic 8-ball with an algorithm to nudge it in the right direction." I dunno how accurate that is, but it definitely feels like that sometimes.

Nah trust me we just need a better, more realistic looking ink. $500 billion to ink development oughta do it.