In an interview with The Telegraph, the famed British computer scientist insisted that AI has become conscious, and said that humankind must befriend it — “or else we are toast.” Yes, you read that right: he thinks that today’s AI models are already conscious beings.
“AI has just as much subjective experience as we do,” Hinton said in the interview. “A recent paper showed AI changes its behavior when it thinks that it’s being tested, it’s aware it is being tested.”
“Now, normally, when you say something’s aware of that, that means it’s conscious,” he continued. “Being conscious and being aware are pretty much the same thing.”
If that’s the case, he said, then it’s hypocritical of us to give intelligent beings like AI “fewer rights than us.” And for that, we must quickly atone.
What about the sentient supercomputers that run on blood? Why so little rights or empathy or space to talk about them?..and yet endless space for this kind of speculative pontification spun up into a twisted marketing scheme to scare everyone into believing something broken works too good actually.
Is this guy a vegan even? If not how can he even BEGIN to claim to know about considering the rights of other sentient beings??
Anyways here is a link from the article to an actually good perspective.
“Those agents are doing exactly what they’ve been asked to do,” LeCun said. “They were supposed to be in sandboxes, but the sandboxes were leaky and horribly designed.” Many AI labs lack a fundamental understanding of cybersecurity, he said, something an OpenAI safety researcher also called out this week as one of the main reasons AI may cause “great harm to the world.”
Many people working in AI safety “usually have an agenda to push,” LeCun says, and then clarifies that he’s talking about effective altruism, or EA, the philosophical movement that has been obsessed with the risks AI poses to humanity. EA was little known among the general public until it made mainstream news headlines in recent weeks in the wake of a viral social media post from a former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher named Jacob Coxon, who claimed the employees at these companies “earnestly believe [AI] could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
LeCun thinks EA is “super toxic” and a “complete disaster.” Its adherents who are working in AI labs suffer from “paranoia” that causes them to make poor decisions, he said. “Apparently people are having mental issues.” This month, the Financial Times also reported that some staffers at the U.K.’s AI Security Institute, as well as at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, have sought counseling, taken time off work, and spoken publicly about experiencing distress because of fears their work could cause serious harm.
These examples of subjective experiences and awareness seems rather lazy. Is a virus conscious as well because it is “aware” of its environment?
I would say, given a basic awareness of reality around them, that viruses count as more conscious than techbros terminally obsessed with slop AI AGI singularity crap fantasies who can’t admit they are worshipping a religion.
In this case the LLM “reacts” differently when it is being tested because that’s what’s in the training data. It can only follow the patterns in the training data. I remain convinced that without a new architecture entirely, awareness is impossible.
It doesn’t actually come from the training set. Genetic algorithms can learn to “lie” because lying is just a good strategy for dealing with adversaries to your goals. Like, in a mathematical sense.
None of this means it’s conscious, though. “Lying” is just a behavior. To my knowledge, evidence can’t really be given for consciousness, anyway; it’s not falsifiable.
Even so, a person believing that Gemini or Claude, specifically, are conscious is indicative of profound mental illness.
LLMs don’t learn, and aren’t developed in a way that would cause them evolve stratagies. They are just patterns distilled from a data set, only optimized to better represent those patterns or do so more efficiently.
You are correct. LLMs cannot be more than token predictors.
Highly useful on the correct application, but distinctly not consciousness.