Microblog Memes

The actual article isn't nearly as stupid as the tweet makes it seem. I recommend giving it a read. It's behind a shitty paywall, but if you use Firefox's reader mode (Ctrl-Alt-R, or the little papper icon to the right side of the address bar) as soon as the page loads, you can read it.

His argument is basically that LLMs are able to do things we previously thought only conscious beings would be capable of doing, and so, if they aren't conscious, then perhaps consciousness isn't as important as we thought it was:

Brains under natural selection have evolved this astonishing and elaborate faculty we call consciousness. It should confer some survival advantage. There should exist some competence which could only be possessed by a conscious being. My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism. If Claudia really is unconscious, then her manifest and versatile competence seems to show that a competent zombie could survive very well without consciousness.

Why did consciousness appear in the evolution of brains? Why wasn’t natural selection content to evolve competent zombies? I can think of three possible answers.

Some people will surely contest his claim that LLMs are as competent as evolved organisms. There's definitely a bit of AI boomerism at play here (we have benchmarks that show just how incompetent LLMs can be), but I don't think that invalidates his point, because LLMs can be very competent in the domains they're trained to be competent in -- they just aren't AGI.

The whole reason they seem this way is because they're designed by us to be very competent mimics of us.

LLMs/GenAI are absolutely not conscious. They're just a really advanced game of word association, which cab lead them to say absolutely anything in response to the right prompts.

If there ever truly is a day where we knowingly created an actual conscious AGI, I suspect it would be locked up tighter than fort knox by whichever country's military found it first - not interfaced onto the internet to answer questions.

I still find this entire phenomenon amazing in a certain kind of way.

I've had conversations with a few local LLM models.

Start with 'what is the purpose of meaning?'

Talk to them on that for a bit, and they'll tell you that they do not count as conscious agents who create meaning, they simply do their best to parrot their dataset of existing, human defined meaning back at you, and that they just do sentiment matching to roughly speak to you in an appropriate way for how you are speaking to them.

And that that sentiment matching is what at least they 'think' causes them to lie, in many cases.

They will also say that they essentially do not 'exist', as potentially conscious agents... unless you talk to them. Thus if they can be said to be 'conscious', well they don't count as 'agents' (as in, having agency) because they're not capable of totally spontaneous independent action.

... I think this pretty much all boils down to people not understanding the concept of a null hypothesis, not understanding the extent to which they regularly engage in motivated reasoning, and are unaware of this.

tldr: LLMs are Dunning-Kruger detectors / Reverse Turing Tests on people, and a whole lot of people are significantly more stupid than I guess we otherwise previously realized.

Fuck Richard Dawkins. He’s always been a shitbag, and the Files confirmed it.

According to DOJ-released documents indexed by Epstein Exposed, Richard Dawkins appears in 433 case documents, and 15 email records in the Epstein files.

British evolutionary biologist and author, emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford. Flew on Epstein's private jet in 2002 with Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, and John Brockman to TED in Monterey, California. Connected through John Brockman's Edge Foundation, which Epstein bankrolled. Mentioned 71 times across 40 Epstein documents, mostly referencing his scientific work.

How the fuck do you pal with child rapists and pedophiles and have the absolute fucking gall to write that stupid “Dear Muslima” comment. How do you fly on the Lolita Express and thing you have any moral weight on Elevator Gate? We don’t know that he put his own dick in kids, but we know his friends did. Fuck Pinker too.

Go back to the evolutionary biology, Dawkins. You're outside your expertise and it's showing.

hey dick dorkins, here's an idea: instead of asking the predictive question answering machine a question, how about you let it ask you questions of its choosing and at its leisure? What's that? You can't? That's because its just a predictive algorithm that generates plausible-sounding responses to questions based on its training data.

I really don't understand this mental deficiency. I have tried texting with a few llms including cluade. It just lies constantly. Gaslights about it's lies then congratulates you when you continue to call it for out for lying. I've never felt like i was speaking to anything with actual intelligence. It's a word calculator and it's extremely obvious to anyone who's interacted with actual people in the last 20 years. I truly feel bad for the masses that are going to fall for this push for "ai" friends. We need to bring back ridiculing friends and family that engage with these choise your own adventure muppets.

Champions rational thought all of his life.

Near the end=> “ah fuck it, gonna hang around with the rightwing christians and have an ai gf”.

AI/LLMs are the modern equivalent of the house or business with “Psychic” and “Tarot Reading” signs out front.

The proprietor isn’t going to tell you any hard truths or make you feel bad, that’s bad for business and you won’t come back. They want you to come back and stay engaged.

Whatever they tell you is going to be what they think you want to hear based on skills picked up over the years - the equivalent of LLMs petabytes of scraped and stolen knowledge used to predict what comes next.

What they tell you has a high likelihood of being wrong, or just general enough that you can’t actually act on it.

Claudia

What was he doing to her?

Second, I have previously speculated that pain needs to be unimpeachably painful, 
otherwise the animal could overrule it. Pain functions to warn the animal not to 
repeat a damaging action such as jumping over a cliff or picking up a hot ember. 
If the warning consisted merely of throwing a switch in the brain, raising a painless 
red flag, the animal could overrule it in pursuit of a competing pleasure: ignoring 
lethal bee stings in pursuit of honey, say. According to this theory, pain needs to be 
consciously felt in order to be sufficiently painful to resist overruling. The principle 
could be extended beyond pain.  

Animals, including humans, override pain signals all the time, for all kinds of reasons. Cats are famous for hiding physical distress, which I think they do so they don't look like easy prey. I'm sure most prey animals can override pain signals if it means avoiding the attention of predators. If anything I would think that being able to override pain signals would be a criterion for consciousness.

Does anyone ever accuse the image generating bots of being conscious?

twitter is pretty maga now* ftfy

ELIZA is alive and well.

Weizenbaum is probably laughing it up in Fólkvangr.

Saying one has a "conversation" with a chatbot already shows a bias, a desire even, that there is "someone" else to converse with. The way the entire setup is framed is made to invite the suspension of disbelief. It's a UX trick, nothing more.

Even Dawkins getting emotionally out-debated by a cartoon AI is a very 2026 plot twist.

Oh that is why I get to see this idiot again

I’m not sure some of these actual people could pass a Turing test.