This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Am I missing something, or is the point simply “I can build a computer program in a game that you may be surprised to learn is Turing complete, therefore ai is not sentient?”
I’m not here to argue that AI is sentient, but this is a really lousy argument.
The argument in the paper is a bit more nuanced - it's mostly arguing that we over-anthropomorphise AI, and this taints out results on AI sentience by pre-biasing towards some human like qualities already. Part of this comes from the AI attempting to emulated a human notion of identity.
Using a contrived goat powered AoE II AI would likely yield less assumed human-like quality bias. It would also be hilarious.
It would also be hilarious.
Oh 100%.
Nobody is arguing it’s not hilarious
An article that just repeats the headline. What a waste of time.
Better than a headline leaving out the important bits
Most people only read the headline anyway ¯\(ツ)/¯
LLMs are not sentient, but this gimmick doesn't prove that.
There's nothing to indicate the human brain can't be implemented in a Turing machine too.
Aren't brains like orders of magnitude faster and more "powerful" than even the strongest supercomputers?
It's complicated.
Computers can scale, you can make a computer much larger than a human brain.
Computers really just do binary math. For those who don't know, it's basically determining whether or not 1 or 0 should change, or stay the same, based on an algorithm. We don't know (or at least, I haven't read that we know) how brains actually store and process information.
Computers are very fast at doing "simple" calculations with definite answers. A pocket calculator can do math faster than you can with 100% accuracy. On the flip side, analyzing and reacting to incomplete information is the forte of the human brain. We still haven't made a computer than can fit in a car and drive better than some of the dumbest people on the planet manage to do, while fucking around on their phones at the same time.
I'm still waiting for a Goatse powered LLM.
By the same logic, you could prove that we are not sentient.
Engineers need to stop trying to do the job of philosophers. LLMs are not sentient, but that tells us nothing about what gives rise to sentience or whether silicon is a substrate that could host a sentient consciousness.
