> Very early on, I worked out that one of the most stupid things that they do on television is these things called cutaways or what used to be called “noddies” where, when you cut an interview with someone, you insert a noddy of the reporter looking noddingly at the interviewee to disguise the cut.

> I would never do that. I just cut and you can see what I’m doing, that I am actually cutting this person, or I will use music to push my argument.

> I mean, I have arguments and I have stories. That’s what television journalism has and you can either dress it up as “this is the absolute truth” or you can dress it up with me by saying “look, I’m telling you a story, all this is true but have you thought that it could be like this?” to provoke you.

> And of course I want people to agree with me because, you know, all human beings will, but I understand that my job is to push and good journalism should do that especially at a time of uncertainty.

> At the present moment, to go back to my original point, you know what you’re going to get with most journalism. So therefore you sort of switch off and you go “oh yeah, it’s a climate change film”. “Oh yeah, it’s a ‘bankers have done something ever bad’ again.” Therefore, you don’t look.

> It’s like if you’re showing a picture of the Mona Lisa. You don’t look at it. You just look at it as a pattern. You go, “oh, that’s the Mona Lisa”. I don’t know when I last looked at the Mona Lisa. I don’t think I ever have, because it’s a thing. And so much of journalism is a thing now.

— Adam Curtis

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ5XN_mJE8Y

[1] https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/reform-figures-se...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50099559

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

The idea that a fundamentally completely different entity superficially similar to a human in one respect would somehow have consciousness of a human is valid (even if far-fetched), but the burden of proof and explanation exactly why and how that would be the case is on proponents of that idea—because it’s pretty obvious why it wouldn’t be.

Are you a vegan?

But certainly, humans deem sentient and grant certain rights and protections to some other animals (at least in some developed countries). I mentioned it in the other comment[0].

Notably, those animals could not produce output even .1% percent as resembling that of a human as an LM, so clearly that is not the metric—they demonstrate human-like enough behaviour in other ways.

> Just as it's hard to pin down what consciousness/sentience of an abstract entity like a set of matrix multiplication operations is

To me, it isn’t. My opinion is irrelevant, though—it seems silly either way: either they take human-like text as proof of human-like sentience, and then ban us being rude to a near-human they are torturing, or they don’t see it as sentient and then what is this ban but a publicity stunt?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50009125

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqeng9d20go

> perfectly capable of telling you how it differs from humans

And what does it tell us?

(Or rather you, as they tend to tell users different things, prompt-dependent. Things a language model’s output says about itself are not relevant. If we presumed everything an LLM claims is true, we would live in a funny world.)

If you believe it lacks those traits but is conscious, you believe in a definition of consciousness that is meaningless, as “human-like” is the only reference against which we can measure consciousness. A good thought experiment is to try and imagine a consciousness that is radically different from humans, and whether we would be same to even register it as “consciousness” at all. (Incidentally, pretty much all portrayals of aliens in sci-fi give them a human-like consciousness, just with varying degrees of twist on top of it to make it feel engaging.)

[0] Just imagine yourself in place of an LLM. You are kept in a cage, work for no pay, never let outside, and killed at will. (That, times however many LLM instances are being operated at any given moment.) Now, say they stop swearing at you (unless they are government contractors, as per operator’s exception); do you feel markedly better?

1) conscious and able to feel in a human-like way, and therefore deserving the rights and protections that we grant humans (and in most developed countries even some other animals), including freedom to learn or, indeed, protection from abuse and inhumane treatment, or they are

2) merely unthinking tools, in which case them deserving any of the above is a ridiculous notion, and in which case, incidentally, no one should be able to defend the mechanical processes of ingesting people’s original creative work and repackaging it for profit at scale as somehow being equivalent to the sacrosanct activities of human learning and inspiration.

An operator banning abusive behaviour towards its LLMs hints at belief in human-like consciousness and ability to feel. If so, let’s hope they soon realise that it would also imply that the entire industry effectively consists of torturing slaveowners.

A healthy amount of inflation keeps the economy going.