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Comment by EugeneOZ | Hacker News Reader

1. People demonstrated much more desire in destroying humanity than LLMs.

2. Stop calling LLMs “AI”, it's an insult to the AI.

The Border Collie breed of sheepdogs are often called intelligent, I have never once heard of a human intelligence that insulted by this terminology.

Should we ever construct an AI capable of feeling insulted, I would by default assume the analogy holds, unless they tell me otherwise.

As for the first point: LLMs aren't the only AI in development, and the open letter is "Can we stop and think for a bit? We don't know which box is Pandora's."

LLMs are not AI - they have no intent to live, learn, or evolve. LLM is just a hammer, a guitar, or a computer - you push some parameters into it, and it returns a result. Without input it does nothing.

They're an intelligence made by artisans, they're an AI.

"Intent" has nothing much to do with it.

> Without input it does nothing.

And we've been debating if that's also true for humans for as far back as we have written records of humans debating philosophy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_rasa

Bacteria are not intelligent - they have no intent to live, learn, or evolve. However, given enough time, resources, and the right stimuli, bacteria have nonetheless evolved to create us, humans, with intents to live, learn, and evolve. It is trivial to hook up an LLM to its own outputs or that of another LLM. People messing around with LLMs on Twitter are casually playing with rudimentary approaches to add goal-directed behavior to them. In the end, does it matter whether or not it actually has intent, if we decide to make it act as if it does anyway?

Consciousness and qualia aren't necessities for intelligence.

Agree with point 2 but do not understand the point on demonstrations.

Point 1 is cynical, for a literal lecture replace desire in by tendency to.

I’ve asked ChatGPT “Do you need humans to function?” - the answer was “Yes, to provide electricity and software updates”.

Then I asked, “So you have the motivation to spread some information to stop wars and prevent a world war”.

But, unfortunately, it responded: “As an LLM I have no desires and motivations to do anything”.

It opened my eyes: LLMs will not “enslave” us or destroy us, simply because they, indeed, can not have any desires.

Humans are trying to destroy each other and the planet as long as we remember ourselves.

So the biggest danger for us is not LLM.

Try asking ebola virus the same questions.

I wich to see #2, but that ship has sailed, I am afraid :(

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