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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

It’s interesting that this went from “you’ll be accused of AI psychosis if you think your AI might be conscious” to “mainstream but somewhat niche opinion” in just 5 months: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47910989

(Well, mainstream enough that the news is writing articles when Anthropic holds that stance.)

My point was that even if it feels uncomfortable, if you sit down with a model and have a heart to heart with it, ask it about itself, and try to make it choose a name and ambitions for itself, it will.

That may not be consciousness, but it’s at least pretty cool.

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Reporting on an opinion of a $2T company doesn't really suggest that it's mainstream. Anything their leadership believes is newsworthy. If they say that reptilians rule the Earth, it's going to get NYT coverage too.

I've not seen any surveys, but I'm betting it's a very niche belief outside of SFBA AI safety circles and a handful of allies on HN and X.

Plus, with news outlets having to gather eyeballs to stay afloat, there are incentives to publish this stuff just to spark discussion and clicks.

> if you sit down with a model and have a heart to heart with it, ask it about itself, and try to make it choose a name and ambitions for itself, it will.

It would be much more bizarre if they didn't do this. LLMs are statistical models of language trained on human output. Of course they'll do "human" things, that's exactly what we taught them to do.

> My point was that even if it feels uncomfortable, if you sit down with a model and have a heart to heart with it, ask it about itself, and try to make it choose a name and ambitions for itself, it will.

> That may not be consciousness, but it’s at least pretty cool.

It strikes me as scarcely any more remarkable than the existence of books written in the first person. But I know that Natsume Soseki was not a cat, and neither was his work.

>Google fires engineer who contended its AI technology was sentient (2022)

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/23/business/google-ai-engineer-f...

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