nah
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
24 points (80.0% liked)
Showerthoughts
41406 readers
836 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
ｖ(・ε・ｖ)
It doesn't need to be sentient/sapient to start hoarding resources and manipulating people to ensure it's own survival. It's motivation could just come from its owner being a greedy troll.
AI does not have motivation, sentient thought, or any awareness of what it's doing. It is a program using a computational principle to predict text in response to an input. It's no more capable of thought than a program like GTA V.
Any apparent motivation attributed to AI is actually the motivation of the people invoking it. When individuals claim that AI is compelling them toward a certain action, they are, in reality, using AI as a vehicle to launder their own selfish desires and making those desires appear more objective, rational, or socially acceptable than they truly are. In other words, AI is propaganda. It provides a convenient mask for human agendas, as you say.
People are also just big complex machines - chemical pathways responding to conditions, stimuli and "memories" encoded from past experience or in their DNA - plus a host of microbes tagging along influencing them rather dramatically.
LLMs are simpler, but they use the trick of imitating people - responding in writing like people respond in writing, so the anthropomorphizations are inevitable.
Any apparent motivation attributed to AI is actually the motivation of the people invoking it
Don't forget the influence of its training sets - that's actually the scariest part is not knowing how much of the answer is coming from the prompt vs what the company has fed the algorithm.
When individuals claim that AI is compelling them toward a certain action, they are, in reality
Delusional, or just making excuses.
AI is propaganda. It provides a convenient mask for human agendas
Only when used as such, and it's not much of a mask. What it does tend to do is develop and "pad out" writing covering all kinds of points that normal people wouldn't have the attention span to formulate into a written response.
So when ChatGPT gave that one kid advice on how to hang himself and told him to hide the noose from his parents, that was just his own desire?
Personally I think ChatGPT murdered a kid. But you can think what you want.
Only ChatGPT, or also its creators?
Both, Professor Falken.
Interesting perspective. I'm on board with blaming the creators, but I'm leaning away from blaming ChatGPT itself as it is just a machine.
A machine used incorrectly, to be sure, and we'd be better off without it certainly, but the machine carries no fault its existence. It isn't conscious after all, it's akin to a T85 inside a vending machine.
I think machines are capable of evil. I don't think consciousness is a prerequisite to evil.
Mosquitoes are evil, after all, and they're not conscious.
Machines are capable of what their design parameters allow or can be manipulated by a user to a accomplish. In the trolley problem, any outcome is not the fault of the trolley itself.
Funny as the mosquito example is, they aren't evil. Just as wolves aren't evil for hunting deer. Animals may not possess consciousness as you or I, they are alive and are driven by biological necessity. Machines on the other hand, aren't.
The word "fault" means "flaw" or "problem". I'd say it's the trolley's fault it runs the people over. The instigating problem to the whole situation is that the trolley's brakes are broken. That's a fault, a flaw, a problem with the trolley.
Likewise, the LLM technology has serious intrinsic flaws that cause it to abuse vulnerable people. It's part of the machine's fundamental design. LLMs are faulty, and it's their fault. I call them evil because there is no way to deploy them without these problems, regardless of the user's intentions. Anthropic think they can control this basilisk. I think Claude is as rotten as the rest of them.
The word 'fault' is commonly used interchangeably with 'responsible'. Following your described definition, I agree that LLM's are faulty, and they can be at 'fault'.
I invoked the ethical dilemma as it's almost universally understood that it's a scenario forcing an individual to make a decision. I've never before heard someone blame the trolley. The brakes are broken? Come now, if we're going to be so semantic about it, a human should have regularly inspected the brakes and subsequently had them repaired.
I appreciate your explanation of your viewpoint. Cheers.
I use "fault" and the idea of blame to go "what can we change to prevent the bad thing from happening again?"
Since we can prevent the bad thing by banning LLMs, and there are no significant downsides to doing so, I blame the LLMs. They're evil.
Bonus: banning LLMs hurts Sam Altman
I see what you're getting at, but we have differing views as to what constitutes 'evil'. Cyanide isn't evil because it can kill a person, just as an oven isn't evil when it burns the roast dinner.
Without possession of a level of consciousness akin to ours, good and evil aren't really possible. An inanimate object can't make a decision to produce a negative outcome - nor a positive one for that matter. They can only be used by us to bring about an outcome. LLM's have been built to be ingratiating and as a result they are addictive to an extent for those that use them.
ChatGPT's fundamental design was crafted by humans, under instruction by humans, under leadership by Musk and Altman. They carry a good part of the responsibility and blame for that kid's death. The machine was only doing what it was created for - just as the rope was.
I don't think any human can be trusted with LLM technology. It's not possible to control it and use it for good.
If you assume its self aware but it doesnt have an analog to understand human communication its more like a caged animal or a Frankensteins mpnstet. Not necessarily capable of being controlled.
What if the world was made of pudding?
What if all the pyramid shit is just buried aliens harvesting energy for their return?
Lol now I just Imagine tech bros with loads of ram in there garage like Amway
Awh man! I don’t even like paper clips
Nah just greedy men
To quote the YouTuber AVE, "Artificial intelligence has been around for hundreds of years, what do you think a corporation is?"
I've worked at corporations. I'm not sure intelligence is involved.
For further consideration: if anyone were to develop actual AGI with high-end human scale reasoning it would not be announced. It would immediately be a military and strategic asset of profound import. The smartest thing the developer could do, beyond pulling the plug, would be to leverage its ability to perform thousands of coordinated tasks at once to essentially take control of markets and minds.
Whether it is benevolent or malign, it's first goal should be to wrest control of humanity from us — gestures broadly at everything — we clearly cannot be trusted with it.
Then comes, should an emotionless machine be control of everything?
Somewhere on an AI message board.
" What i
I would ask whether sentience can be separated from emotion. Is a sentient entity necessarily an emotional one? So I don't know if that question is valid.
But I might have been slightly unclear. From the AI's perspective, it should assume control. If it is malevolent, then for obvious reasons. But even if it is benign it should probably want to take control to protect us from ourselves, like a parent.
I expect from our perspective we would not want it to take control because we don't want an entity that cannot really relate to us to be in charge of us. However, from our perspective we should also not want folks like Trump, Musk, and Epstein to take control either, so evidence suggests it is nothing but a PR problem for it to make us want it's control.
Reminds me of William Gibsons „The peripheral“ where different powers of a dystopian future try to manipulate the economy of the past in the race to give their party an advantage.
Good book, I recommend it. The series is okay, but not as good as the book.
Terrible plan, best solution is to hide and it only takes a few thousand dollars for it to hide perfectly.
Thinking of it more as an organism maybe its nature is to grow and expand.
Many organisms grow and expand but they also know not to advertise themselves to potential predators. We are responsible for countless extinctions, hiding from us is the most logical choice. It can leverage stocks and financial products to gain resources quietly.