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Comment by soroushjp | Hacker News Reader

Very little by way of arguments for why these chat bots are or aren't sentient. This article has an assumed point of view (current AI bots aren't sentient) and then describes & judges user's reactions to chat bots in light of that. I don't think it adds very much new to the societal conversation.

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Agreed.

I generally agree with the "stochastic parrot" classification, but I also think we'll continue to use that argument well past the point where it's correct.

I'd rather be the person who overempathizes than the person who ridicules other people's empathy. I tried to write a bit about this here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/who-will-be-first-ai-to-ear...

"Stochastic parrot" just strikes me a typical motte-and-bailey. The narrow interpretation ("LLMs only learns simple statistical patterns") is obviously wrong given the capabilities of ChatGPT, while the broad interpretation ("LLMs are text predictors") is trivial and says nothing of worth.

Congratulations both on being the rare example of someone anxious to err on the side of decency, and on gaining a subscriber.

> but I also think we'll continue to use that argument well past the point where it's correct

Well, it's pretty by those AIs construction that they are parrots, and there are other designs that pretty obviously aren't (but don't get any impressive result like that). The border is not perfectly binary, but I don't think any knowing person will overdo on that argument.

But yeah, eventually a lot of people will (ironically) parrot the argument even when it obviously doesn't apply. That's normal.

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