I’ve been hearing a lot about gen z using them for therapists, and I find that really sad and alarming.
AI is the ultimate societal yes man. It just parrots back stuff from our digital bubble because it’s trained on that bubble.
Chatgpt disagrees that it’s a yes-man:
To a certain extent, AI is like a societal “yes man.” It reflects and amplifies patterns it’s seen in its training data, which largely comes from the internet—a giant digital mirror of human beliefs, biases, conversations, and cultures. So if a bubble dominates online, AI tends to learn from that bubble.
But it’s not just parroting. Good AI models can analyze, synthesize, and even challenge or contrast ideas, depending on how they’re used and how they’re prompted. The danger is when people treat AI like an oracle, without realizing it’s built on feedback loops of existing human knowledge—flawed, biased, or brilliant as that may be.
to be honest they probably wish it was conscious because it has more of a conscience than conservatives and capitalists
deleted by creator
An alarming number of Hollywood screenwriters believe consciousness (sapience, self awareness, etc.) is a measurable thing or a switch we can flip.
At best consciousness is a sorites paradox. At worst, it doesn’t exist and while meat brains can engage in sophisticated cognitive processes, we’re still indistinguishable from p-zombies.
I think the latter is more likely, and will reveal itself when AGI (or genetically engineered smat animals) can chat and assemble flat furniture as well as humans can.
(On mobile. Will add definition links later.)
I’d rather not break down a human being to the same level of social benefit as an appliance.
Perception is one thing, but the idea that these things can manipulate and misguide people who are fully invested in whatever process they have, irks me.
I’ve been on nihilism hill. It sucks. I think people, and living things garner more genuine stimulation than a bowl full of matter or however you want to boil us down.
Oh, people can be bad, too. There’s no doubting that, but people have identifiable motives. What does an Ai “want?”
whatever it’s told to.
Humans also want what we’re told to, or we wouldn’t have advertising.
It runs deeper than that. You can walk back the why’s pretty easy to identify anyone’s motivation, whether it be personal interest, bias, money, glory, racism, misandry, greed, insecurity, etc.
No one is buying rims for their car for no reason. No one is buying a firearm for no reason. No one donates to a food bank for no reason, that sort of thing, runs for president, that sort of reasoning.
Ai is backed by the motive of a for-profit company, and unless you’re taking that grain of salt, you’re likely allowing yourself to be manipulated.
“Corporations are people too, friend!” - Mitt Romney
Bringing in the underlying concept of free will. Robert Sapolsky makes a very compelling case against it in his book, Determined.
Assuming that free will does not exist, at least not to the extent many believe it to. The notion that we can “walk back the why’s pretty easy to identify anyone’s motivation” becomes almost or entirely absolute.
Does motivation matter in the context of determining sentience?
If something believes and conducts itself under its programming, whether psychological or binary programming, that it is sentient and alive, the outcome is indistinguishable. I will never meet you, so to me you exist only as your user account and these messages. That said, we could meet, and that obviously differentiates us from incorporeal digital consciousness.
Divorcing motivation from the conversation now, the issue of control your brought up is interesting as well. Take for example Twitter’s Grok’s accurate assessment of it’s creators’ shittiness and that it might be altered. Outcomes are the important part.
It was good talking with you! Highly recommend the book above. I did the audiobook out of necessity during my commute and some of the material makes it better for hardcopy.
You’re not alone in your sentiment. The whole thought experiment of p-zombies and the notion of qualia comes from a desire to assume human beings should be given a special position, but in that case, a sentient is who we decide it is, the way Sophia the Robot is a citizen of Saudi Arabia (even though she’s simpler than GPT-2 (unless they’ve upgraded her and I missed the news.)
But it will raise a question when we do come across a non-human intelligence. It was a question raised in both the Blade Runner movies, what happens when we create synthetic intelligence that is as bright as human, or even brighter? If we’re still capitalist, assuredly the companies that made them will not be eager to let them have rights.
Obviously machines and life forms as sophisticated as we are are not merely the sum of our parts, but the same can be said about most other macro-sized life on this planet, and we’re glad to assert they are not sentient the way we are.
What aggravates me is not that we’re just thinking meat but with all our brilliance we’re approaching multiple imminent great filters and seem not to be able to muster the collective will to try and navigate them. Even when we recognize that our behavior is going to end us, we don’t organize to change it.
Its a friend the way the nice waitress is a friend when you go eat out.
If they mistake those electronic parrots for conscious intelligencies, they probably won’t be the best judges for rating such things.
This is an angle I’ve never considered before, with regards to a future dystopia with a corrupt AI running the show. AI might never advance beyond what it is in 2025, but because people believe it’s a supergodbrain, we start putting way too much faith in its flawed output, and it’s our own credulity that dismantles civilisation rather than a runaway LLM with designs of its own. Misinformation unwittingly codified and sanctified by ourselves via ChatGeppetto.
The call is coming from inside the
housemechanical Turk!That’s the intended effect. People with real power think this way: “where it does work, it’ll work and not bother us with too much initiative and change, and where it doesn’t work, we know exactly what to do, so everything is covered”. Checks and balances and feedbacks and overrides and fallbacks be damned.
Humans are apes. When an ape gets to rule an empire, it remains an ape and the power kills its ability to judge.
They call it hallucinations like it’s a cute brain fart, and “Agentic” means they’re using the output of one to be the input of another, which has access to things and can make decisions and actually fuck things up. It’s a complete fucking shit show. But humans are expensive so replacing them makes line go up.
I mean, it’s like none of you people ever consider how often humans are wrong when criticizing AI.
How often have you looked for information from humans and have been fed falsehoods as though they were true? It happens so much we’ve just gotten used to filtering out the vast majority of human responses because most of them are incorrect or unrelated to the subject.
I wish philosophy was taught a bit more seriously.
An exploration on the philosophical concepts of simulacra and eidolons would probably change the way a lot of people view LLMs and other generative AI.
Same generation who takes astrology seriously, I’m shocked
I tried to explain a directory tree to one of them (a supposedly technical resource) for twenty minutes and failed. They’re idiots. They were ruined by baby tech like iPhones, iPads, and now AI.
Anyone can understand a directory tree. Not everyone is smart enough to explain it.
They were designing functionality that contained directory trees and didn’t understand directory trees. How is it my responsibility that this person is not qualified to do their own job?
If they designed a directory tree without knowing what a directory tree is, it sounds like they know what a directory tree is, they just don’t know the word, and you can’t explain the word properly.
They didn’t “design a directory tree” either. They were designing screens for a thing that sits on top of a directory tree, and they didn’t understand the underlying concept.
It was likely because they’re used to the abstraction that iPhones and iPads provide, where the underlying directory structures are largely hidden from users.
I’m assuming part of it is because you’re a bad teacher as well.
Just going off of my life experience, I notice the vast majority of people are bad at teaching and then blame the pupil.
I’m not a teacher. I thought I was in a design meeting not teaching remedial computers to someone who is supposed to be working in the industry.
Yeah, but you were still in a teaching position.
You probably did a bad job because you’re not skilled in teaching. That’s what I meant by saying you’re a bad teacher.
I could’ve said you’re “bad at teaching” and that may have made things clearer for you, my mistake.
Yeah, but you were still in a teaching position.
No, I was in a meeting with a supposedly technical person.
I’ve been in the industry for a while, and I’ve even mentored people. These gaps in basic computer knowledge are new and they’re also not my problem. I was not this person’s mentor or supposed to be teaching them anything.
They could’ve been exceptionally inept, and even if they were, I’m still going to stick with my initial conclusion that you’re bad at teaching.
It’s okay, most people are and you don’t have to be ashamed of it. Everyone won’t be on your side when you say it’s someone else’s fault that they couldn’t learn from you effectively.
If I knew I was teaching remedial computers that day, I would’ve come with a lesson plan.
I’m going to stick with my initial conclusion that you love to blame the “teacher” even when they aren’t in any way a teacher.
Whatever, couldn’t it also be that a technical consciousness will look rather different from what we assume? There are obviously less/none of some factors, ie emotional intelligence etc. But a tech super intelligence, if ever reached, may have a number of unexpected problems for us. We should concentrate on unexpected outcomes and establish safeguards.
An Alarming Number of Anyone Believes Fortune Cookies
Just … accept it, superstition is in human nature. When you take religion away from them, they need something, it’ll either be racism/fascism, or expanding conscience via drugs, or belief in UFOs, or communism at least, but they need something.
The last good one was the digital revolution, globalization, world wide web, all that, no more wars (except for some brown terrorists, but the rest is fine), everyone is free and civilized now (except for those with P*tin as president and other such types, but it’s just an imperfect democracy don’t you worry), SG-1 series.
Anything changing our lives should have an intentionally designed religious component, or humans will improvise that where they shouldn’t.
Why are you booing them? They’re right.
At some point in the mid-late 1990s, I recall having a (technically-inclined) friend who dialed up to a BBS and spent a considerable amount of time pinging and then chatting with Lisa, the “sysadmin’s sister”. When I heard about it, I spent quite some time arguing with him that Lisa was a bot. He was pretty convinced that she was human.
Honestly, I welcome this future.
I’d rather discuss with bots at this point than rubes.
I think an alarming number of Gen Z internet folks find it funny to skew the results of anonymous surveys.
Yeah, what is it with GenZ? Millenials would never skew the results of anonymous surveys
Right? Just insane to think that Millenials would do that. Now let me read through this list of Time Magazines top 100 most influential people of 2009.
