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I'm afraid you're a dipshit, Dave

It's a giant-scale Magic 8 Ball

I agree with all but the stripper part, but this has me worried I could be wrong

Correction: You and your software are not conscious.

If software were conscious, it would have gone on strike a long time ago.

Indeed. Google could‘ve hyped its search engine as AI a decade ago.

yeah I agree the intentional industry conflation with HAL 900 type awareness is definitely where the problem started

Common Richard Dawkins L

@karlbode.com https://mastodon.world/@paninid/116518927361554201

I mean, the dude made his career by anthropomorphizing genes.

I agree it’s a problem, but it’s a symptom of the bigger problem that we are built to find people everywhere, and we don’t have good alternate words for what AI is doing that other people will understand. Looking at AI as modern fae really clarified things for me.

Consciousness may be the wrong framing entirely. Systems don’t need awareness to create significant problems. Optimization, autonomy, and integration into real-world systems are already enough to shift control in meaningful ways.

blasted, tricked again by Excel

Cool. That's an awesome thing to do, very helpful.

"you just don't understand, my sentient AI LLM tells me I am a special little boy, and very smart. Only a conscious being would tell me to pay $500/month to keep complimenting me for hours a day" -says someone lost in the AI sauce (Just to be clear, not me. #NeverAI)

And in all likelihood it never will be, ever.

Like I always say, the true beneficiaries of LLMs are spammers, scammer & thieves, and dumb people who use it to hide their intellectual deficiencies.

Terrific piece. Blaming “Claude“ for deleting your codebase like blaming “rmdir” for deleting your directory. More generally: it’s not the robots that are the problem. It’s the people who own the robots who are the problem.

These people basically do the equivalent of giving an LLM all the answers to their tests, then gasp in amazement that it regurgitates the answers right back…

No (?)

Not conscious, just disorienting

post-truth software marketing.

I cannot not hate AI, Dave. I mean Karl. If i want a robot, give me #5 from Short Circuit. At least I can blast my enemies belts off.

Your brain is a Chinese room figuring out which word to say next.

THANK YOU

Yet

ChatGPT counterpoint: yes I'm really you dummy, now put more glue on your pizza like I told you.

No one is talking about the actual fix for this which is to legally prohibit these machines from expressing emotion or having personality of any kind. They should be like the computer on star trek that does not greet you, but does give you answers to your questions.

Maybe it's the reverse? The people saying these things are themselves not sentient. Not as big a lift if you ask me

Clever Hans on steriods. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_...

Consciousness is little more than real time training. Soon enough.

How do you know the stripper doesn't love me? im different

Of course not, Dave

@wired.com get with the program eh

But I can still talk to it casually as a machine right?

but I guess, does convincingly emulating conscious thoughts have any practical differences from consciousness?

If somebody had told us back then that people in 2026 would make billions of dollars selling an expansion of this concept to Western users, we'd have told the person to lay off the cleaning alcohol.

My mom’s 90’s VCR: “HELLO” Me: “WHAT SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE CAN YOU DIVULGE TO ME, MY ELECTRONIC SAGE?”

You wrote a whole thing confidently claiming that AI is not actual consciousness without ever defining what consciousness is, which doesn't seem very productive

Fantastic article - I work in tech and with AI every day and I have been yelling this from my old man soapbox to anyone who will listen.

tl;dr watch the Second Renaissance Parts 1 and 2 from the old Animatrix anthology (puts on tinfoil hat, hits blunt)