You could use paint and scrawl it on with your fingers.
Surely the only way to be sure is to license people's hands.
12 karma · joined October 14, 2026
Surely the only way to be sure is to license people's hands.
A LLM is not a brain. Brains are the product of selective pressure, LLMs are the product of a scanner, matrix algebra and a loss function.
A brain is successful if it keeps a body alive long enough to successfully breed (not even necessarily its own). To do that it has an almost innumerable collection of competing factors. It's deciding the next action.
An LLM is predicting the next token, often of a string of text that is the product of some brain. If so, it's an entirely conceptual account (words) of some brains' subjective experience that is (at least partially - eg emotion) completely untethered to the world.
These are very, very different things.
For example, why would we expect something whose entire selection pressure is "what happens next" to develop a sense of self?
There is no self, there is only the next token. An LLMs behaviour might make it LOOK like it's doing things that imply it has a self, but that's illusory - it's just imitating the average tokens that humans produce in its current state - because that's the very nature of what it is.
Human input data is sensory data about the world, which they collect in a way that is directed and attention driven. It involves agency. That sensory data is abstracted, by perception, by memory, and influenced by emotional context and the context of prior memory. Humans then record that in the form of language which is a further abstraction. But each abstraction is a label which is in some chain that can be grounded to subjective experience.
That's not true of an LLM. A LLM is a relation model of tokens (which we recognise as labels to things or concepts), based on harvesting the complex relationships between tokens from a massive corpus of labels - which are taken from (amongst other things) the sum total of human expression of the human experience.
So an LLM can tell me about what it feels like to experience the sun on its skin on the beach, but what it is really doing is regurgitating some sample of human expression about what that is. It can regurgitate a story that lies on the surface of recorded human expression, but it's still a regurgitation. It's just processing tokens.
The map is not the territory.
An LLM can find you a novel new route on the map, but it can't explore new territory, it can just tell you about someone else's map.
Humans have subjective experiences, they create individual memories, they relate these using language.
LLMs are trained on accounts of the experiences of others to regurgitate a facimilie of that experience.
As a human, my input data isn't a diary account or a book or a home video. It's a real world experience that I participate in, and that I use language to communicate.
An LLM is a facimilie of everything it's made up of. It doesn't have its own agency, it doesn't have its own thoughts. I can ask it what it is like to ride a roller coaster and it will give me some text, but what is that text? It's something that someone else wrote about something the llm has no real experience of.
The llm is in platos cave staring at other peoples shadows.
You don't have to eradicate them all.
Wait for the robot workforce to be deployed, then visit a few deadly pathogen storage facilities. Society collapses and then you send in the murder bots, or you just ignore the ants.
Humanity has wiped out lots of species without deliberate organised effort.
Yes, that's what I'm assuming...
Humans may not have many original thoughts, but the thoughts that they arrive at are the product of (at least partially) independent processes.
An LLM is constructed. It no more had its own thoughts than a physical book has written its own story.
We're just going one step back. Instead of picking up a book, we're picking up a book generator. A book generator that was created from scanning in a bunch of books. All those books have authors and the book generator has essentially been authored by that collection of authors.
The book generator can very convincingly tell me what it is like to be a parent, in every way, but all it's doing is regurgitating data. It's never been a parent, it will never be a parent, it has never held a child or even experienced a single emotion. The word "parent" is just a collection of tokens. It's not a label that it uses to make sense of its experience, or other llms experience, of reality.
It's just an overly elaborate chinese room.
Based on our current trajectory all it seems to require to me is a basic plan and a bit of patience...
An LLMs experience is everyone else's subjective view of their history. It doesn't make its own and it never can.
An LLM is a clone of Guy Pearce trapped in a context window which is just reruns of memento with script variations.
If the AI doesn't give a shit I assumed it would just get rid of us, and if it did give a shit it would be making maximal utility judgements.
The older I get, increasingly, the thing I crave most is real connection.
I imagine they'd also conclude Picard is a loser.
With porn you can at least entertain the idea of emotional and genetic aspects of sex as being in the background.
AI avatar porn seems like getting randy for a erotically shaped joystick. It's just desperately sad.
Same same
At the moment people are confusing the equivalence of things because it's a point in time. This always happens at any given point in time.
Seems kind of stupid, because AI companies aren't cuddly benevolent family members, they want to eat everyone's lunch.
Humans aren't magical.
They also aren't a glorified library. They are authors, they generate the books in the library.
Cross reference a load of books and you will get useful relational info, but it's still a library index in a library.
Language to humans is a symbolic mapping of labels to reality based on actual experience.
"Language" to LLMs is just a string of tokens to manipulate based on relationships harvested from recorded human experience.
It doesn't mean anything other than 1s and 0s - it's not a language because the LLM isn't communicating with you, just as the sum of humanity isn't communicating with you.
It's just a really good "choose your own adventure" book.
For example, America's comically slanted politics casts any kind of mixed economy as socialism/communism (as barely any American can define either) thus tarring any socialisation of policy (eg healthcare) as "communism", which is a bit like encouraging Americans to take up satanism.