No we don't? We understand practically nothing of how modern frontier systems actually function (in the sense that we would not be able to recreate even the tiniest fraction of their capabilities by conventional means). Knowing how they're trained has nothing to do with understanding their internal processes.

Bet?

This is false. There are many human-legible signs, and there do exist fairly reliable AI detection services (like Pangram).

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45962633

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

But if you want to get a sense of how I noticed (before I confirmed my suspicion with machine assistance), here are some tells: "Large firms are cautious in regulatory filings because they must disclose risks, not hype." - "[x], not [y]"

"The suggestion that companies only adopt AI out of fear of missing out ignores the concrete examples already in place." - "concrete examples" as a phrase is (unfortunately) heavily over-represented in LLM-generated content.

"Stock prices reflect broader market conditions, not just adoption of a single technology." - "[x], not [y]" - again!

"Failures of workplace pilots usually result from integration challenges, not because the technology lacks value." - a third time.

"The fact that 374 S&P 500 companies are openly discussing it shows the opposite of “no clear upside” — it shows wide strategic interest." - not just the infamous emdash, but the phrasing is extremely typical of LLMs.

(Also, they did in fact give it the ability to terminate conversations...?)

I didn't say that there's a connection between the two of them because we don't understand them. The fact that we don't understand them means it's difficult to confidently rule out this possibility.

The reason we might privilege the hypothesis (https://www.lesswrong.com/w/privileging-the-hypothesis) at all is because we might expect that the human behavior of talking about consciousness is causally downstream of humans having consciousness.

> We have reason to assume consciousness exists because it serves some purpose in our evolutionary history, like pain, fear, hunger, love and every other biological function that simply don't exist in computers. The idea doesn't really make any sense when you think about it.

I don't really think we _have_ to assume this. Sure, it seems reasonable to give some weight to the hypothesis that if it wasn't adaptive, we wouldn't have it. (But not an overwhelming amount of weight.) This doesn't say anything about the underlying mechanism that causes it, and what other circumstances might cause it to exist elsewhere.

> If GPT-5 is conscious, why not GPT-1?

Because GPT-1 (and all of those other things) don't display behaviors that, in humans, we believe are causally downstream of having consciousness? That was the entire point of my comment.

And, to be clear, I don't actually put that high a probability that current models have most (or "enough") of the relevant qualities that people are talking about when they talk about consciousness - maybe 5-10%? But the idea that there's literally no reason to think this is something that might be possible, now or in the future, is quite strange, and I think would require believing some pretty weird things (like dualism, etc).

Yep!

> The framing comes across to me as a clearly mentally unwell position (ie strong anthropomorphization) being adopted for PR reasons.

This doesn't at all follow. If we don't understand what creates the qualities we're concerned with, or how to measure them explicitly, and the _external behaviors_ of the systems are something we've only previously observed from things that have those qualities, it seems very reasonable to move carefully. (Also, the post in question hedges quite a lot, so I'm not even sure what text you think you're describing.)

Separately, we don't need to posit galaxy-brained conspiratorial explanations for Anthropic taking an institutional stance re: model welfare being a real concern that's fully explained by the actual beliefs of Anthropic's leadership and employees, many of whom think these concerns are real (among others, like the non-trivial likelihood of sufficiently advanced AI killing everyone).