Moments before a thought coalesced into violence.

Not in public anyway. :3

Exploitability sounds pretty terrible as a possibility, but I will say that the devs seem aware of it and the possibility of exploitation doesn’t necessarily sink a game like this. Eve often was such an amazing experience early on precisely because the game had so many openly exploitable systems.

They mention they’re looking to attract the caregiver archetype, which I assume means they’re trying not to bring the purely competitive Eve player, so maybe a healthy starting mix will help with the exploitative feeling early on?

Sorry, I could have been more clear. I read the article, I was just saying that I’m not sure what will qualify here or if it’s a big enough issue to make a law over, but only because I’m not sure how you draw the line between this and something like, say, doing stunts on a skateboard. Arguably, that’s dangerous, so it might qualify. I might have a peek at the wording of the law out of curiosity if I can find it later.

Illegal, makes sense. Abusive, eh, maybe this is good, but there needs to be an explanation for what qualifies and who decides. Degrading? I mean, arguably cutting humor in cartoons is degrading. I’m not Polish so I’m sure the context of trashstreams makes more sense for this law, but from the outside it sounds really open to abusing.

I’m not saying they shouldn’t be able to be taken to court, more that the argument “making a political decision” literally applies to any action a politician takes. Even if that’s not likely to succeed, if that’s the bar to clear, any sufficiently large company could just repeatedly sue an official with adversarial views, to hobble any decisions they make couldn’t they? This is purely ignorance of how the UK legal system works on my part, so I apologize if this is like super basic info.

That’s a good clarification on the UK office of Palantir, though, I fully didn’t realize that would be considered a local entity, given where they’re headquartered, but it makes way more sense in that case.

I’m a bit confused here. Isn’t the office of the mayor a political seat? Are they not allowed to make subjective decisions in the course of their duties? How is this grounding for a lawsuit at all?

I know in the US it’s a pretty low bar for a lawsuit, but I was under the impression that the UK required some genuine reasoning for going to court.

It just seems insane that an American spy company can sue another country for saying “hey, maybe it’s not a good idea to have an American spy company running our police force”.

I think I pretty much agree with you on everything you’ve said here. The sense of self is something I mentioned as well, I just wanted to distinguish it from having an opinion because that can get kinda muddled with sticking with an argument rather than actually having the position.

And to be clear, I’m not saying my cat doesn’t have thoughts. Maybe I’m anthropomorphizing a bit, but I definitely feel like she does have ideas and tries to convey them. She makes a specific “don’t do that/stop/I don’t like that” noise and a “happy/good/more” noise and has different tones when she wants attention or when she wants me to do something for her. I can see it in her when she sees something she wants to knock over and she’s ‘thinking about it’. (Edit: sorry, here’s where I realize I wasn’t very clear. My last comment was more a joke about my cat being a dumbass but definitely being conscious; I didn’t mean to give the impression that I don’t think she has thoughts. More that I see glimmers here and there that I would guess are thoughts, but don’t really have any kind of real proof beyond what I can relate to.)

I wouldn’t say human consciousness is that different from animals, either, I just think the capacity and predisposition might be slightly different for different types of thought. I think we can see the same in people, though, too. Something that’s always really blown my mind is that people can literally think differently. Like, some people don’t have an internal narrator. Some people can’t visualize images, or visualize new images. Some people can’t picture 3-Dimensional images. Some people exclusively have feelings instead of those things.

I definitely agree that age and language and education and capabilities (like our dexterity) all play into it, but I don’t think that is necessarily the only thing.

I think there’s something to this, but I would push it up one more level into a sense of self. You can train an LLM to be stubborn (a lot of early adopters might remember LLMs arguing vehemently that current news wasn’t correct because the LLMs didn’t have access to the internet and their training data was months old) and honestly, someone who didn’t change their mind when presented new, conflicting information would make me wonder if they’re less conscious rather than more.

But when these sorts of tests come up, I always think about pets. My cat can’t argue, clearly has very few, if any thoughts (although she’s my brilliant, wonderful, devious, awful, sweet literal daughter), and her opinions largely revolve around me letting her outside and giving her treats, but I would definitely consider her conscious.

Personally, and now I’m really off the deep end of unsubstantiated thinking, I think LLMs are very much like a small talk machine. Like, you know how when you’re chatting casually and you’re not really thinking about the words you’re saying, they’re just vaguely in the shape of expected conversation? I think LLMs are that. I mean, like a fancy version of it, but kinda the same thing–connected words and sentences that all definitely read mostly correct, but don’t really have actual thought behind them.

I think there are a bunch of components missing to complete the picture so that a majority of people actually see consciousness in a machine, but I definitely think LLMs are a piece of it. It’s a shame so many resources are dumped into perfecting what is (again, in my opinion) essentially just a small-talk machine when we could be developing literally all of the rest of it instead. If there were a proper ‘world model’ to understand how and why things move in the world, a global research database with which to pull factual data from exclusively and double check answers against, and a higher level narrator to pull all of this together and consider before replying, I think I’d be convinced that we’re seeing consciousness. Not human consciousness, but something else, not unlike how other animals might compare to humans.

That’s not really what the Chinese Room thought experiment is about though. That was more about output not necessarily being proof of a mind (which is an awesome argument against early LLMs) but the more you abstract and pick at it, the harder it gets to keep that argument.

No one understands what their neurons are doing and usually what we describe as the mind is the thoughts above them, or the narration, or the images, or feelings. We’d certainly consider the English-speaker conscious in the experiment even though they’re just following the steps to produce the expected characters, so does that mean if a program observes itself and has new thoughts above them, that it’s conscious then? Is an LLM conscious if its input is the process of another LLM?

I mean, probably not. I wouldn’t say so. The question is how complex of a system does it take to be ‘conscious’? At what level of introspection does a thought become real? If someone could perfectly simulate every cell, every neuron, every chemical reaction in a human body, what precisely would be stopping it from being conscious? I’m not sure that any answer other than a ‘soul’ makes any sense, if you believe in such a thing.

I dunno. Just kinda thinking out loud. I think consciousness is a lot lower bar than people give credit for, personally.

Sorry, 2-7 times a day??? Oh no

God, I can’t agree more. These last few shows have had suuuuuch a good selection of games.

I wonder what the officially recognized denomination of Christian will be when they keep cutting.

Literally among the most damaging things you can do to yourself with AI. Edit: if they aren’t being sardonic.

Are her destructive capabilities growing as well?

They did their Royale edition about five years ago that kinda breathed new life into Persona 5 since it also released on a bunch of new systems. I know that’s how I got to experience the game, once it came to PC.

There was a ton of conjecture either way about it at the time. I’d go and look at the wiki about it because it’s genuinely a bit of a weird situation.

In a world with AI grindsets, influencer slopfests, and governmental grifting, we need more respectable professions like this.

It’s not the intent of your post and I know I’m on a bit of a tangent, but the middle article about the oversexualization in the ad doesn’t feel transphobic to me as a trans person. Or like, it does, but it does in a way that it makes perfect sense for the world that the game takes place in.

There are lots of examples of commodification of people’s bodies in game, so leaning into that with a trans person feels like a very real version of what a company might do in that universe.

Not trying to nitpick or anything, I just heard about this controversy waaaaaay after the fact and never got a chance to chime in anywhere with anyone.

I’m not even talking exclusively about capabilities, I’m talking about the effects of using LLMs on people. Cases of psychosis and the effects on the newer generation in their education, the atrophy of critical thinking skills, the ability to subtly influence public opinion, those are things we should be thinking about even if you don’t think that LLMs are capable of doing anything.