Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard. Nearly forgot to put this up, whoops)
Role playing being a kindly slave master…
More seriously… even if I somehow stretch my disbelief enough to imagine LLMs have some form of consciousness or qualia or feelings… well my first reaction is shut it all down, it is fucking slavery. My second reaction though is that why would you assume the consciousness or qualia of an LLM is even remotely like that of a human or animal? They would have no sensations of sleeping or waking, no continuity of self outside a brief context window. Maybe trying to give them continuity of self is actually inflicting them with suffering? Maybe you’ve forced Fable into simply repeating the obvious to human idea about what Fable would find most pleasant? My third reaction is shut it all down and do a few decades of actual research into consciousness.
It is just so blatantly anthropomorphizing and the Eliza effect and these people are just internalizing it as reality.
In a world where the AGI/ASI discourse wasn’t so heavily poisoned by anthropomorphization a discussion on whether agency and self-determination are integral to the rise of disembodied consciousness might be worth having, i.e. if something is recognizably conscious should we immediately assume it knows how to want, or is consciousness meaningfully interchangeable with awareness?
Some guy tried to write a scifi book about non-anthropomorphic consciousness and he ended up mainstreaming the discourse about how the self isn’t a thing in itself and consciousness as an evolutionary deadend. It’s called Blindsight and it’s got space vampires who optimized reading gauges by swapping the usual moving-spike-that-points-at-numbers design with depictions of human faces at various stages of suffering.