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Video game NPCs can't have conversations with you or go on weird schizo tangents if you leave them alone talking with eachother. They're far more reactive than dynamic. This is a pretty weird, complex output for a nonthinking machine:
https://x.com/repligate/status/1847787882896904502/photo/1
Sensation is a process in the mind. Nerves don't have sensation, sensors don't have sensation, it's the mind that feels something. You can still feel things from a chopped off limb but without the brain, there is no feeling. What about the pain people feel when they discover someone they respect has political views they find repugnant? Or the pain of the wrong guy winning the election? The pain of a sub-par media release they'd been excited about? There are plenty of kinds of purely intellectual pain, just as there are purely intellectual thrills. I see no reason why we can rule out emotions purely based on substrate. Many people who deeply and intensively investigate modern AIs find them to be deeply emotional beings.
I dispute that the Britannica is even giving me more complex or more intelligent output. It can't use its 'knowledge' of the 7 years war to create other kinds of knowledge, it can't make it into a text adventure game or a poem or a song or craft alternate-history versions of the seven year's war. The 'novel tasks' part greatly increases complexity of the output, it allows for interactivity and a vast amount of potential output beyond a single pdf.
A more accurate analogy is that anti-AI image software interferes (or tries to interfere) with AI learning, not the actual vision process. It messes with the encoding process that squeezes down the data of millions and billions of images down into a checkpoint files a couple of gigabytes in size. I bet if we knew how the human vision process worked we could do things like that to people too.
I did a quick sanity test and put an image from the Glaze website into Claude and asked for a description. It was dead on the money, telling me about the marsh, the horse and rider, the colour palette and so on. So even if these manipulations can interfere with the training process, they clearly don't interfere with the vision process, whatever is going on technical terms. So they do pass the most basic test of vision and many of the advanced ones.
https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html
If you leave them alone shooting at each other they can engage in dynamic combat, what more do you want :P
I don't believe I ever said that LLMs were not "thinking." Certainly LLMs can think inasmuch as they are performing mathematical operations to produce output. (But then again we don't necessarily think of our cell phone calculator as "thinking" when it performs mathematical operations to produce output, although I certainly may catch myself saying a computer is "thinking" any time it is performing an operation that takes time!)
Take a rattlesnake, remove its brain, and then grab its body and inflict pain upon it. It will strike you (or attempt to do so). It may not be "feeling" anything in the subjective experiential sense, but it is "feeling" in the sense of sensing. Similarly, if you put your hand on a hot stove, your body will likely act to move your hand away before the pain signal reaches your brain. I suppose one can draw many conclusions from this. I draw a couple:
Sensation, to the extent that it is a process, is probably not a process entirely in the brain - sure, the mind is taking in signals from elsewhere, but it's not the only part of the body processing or interpreting those signals. (Or maybe a better way of saying it is that the mind is not entirely in the brain).
Things without intelligence or consciousness can still behave intelligently.
Britannica is probably more complex and intelligent than an equivalent sample-size of all LLM output.
Sure, I agree with this. But e.g. Midjourney is also capable of generating vast amounts of potential output - do you believe Midjourney is intelligent? Does it experience qualia? Is it self-aware or conscious? Or are text-based AIs considered stronger candidates for intelligence and self-awareness because they seem self-aware, without any consideration to whether or not their output is more complex? Which contains more information, a 720 x 720 picture or a 500 word essay generated by an LLM?
As I understand it, LLMs use larger training data than image generation models, despite most likely outputting less information - bits - per prompt than an image model. This suggests to me that complexity of output is not necessarily a good measure of (for lack of a better word) intelligence, or capability.
These things are, as I understand it, mediated by hormones, which moderate not only emotions like disgust and anxiety but also influence people's political views to begin with. These reactions aren't "purely intellectual" if by "purely intellectual" you mean "fleshly considerations don't come into it at all."
We can do optical illusions on people, yes. And both the human consciousness and an LLM are receiving signals that are mediated (for instance the human brain will fill in your blind spot). But the process is different.
Adobe Acrobat does this too, with optical character recognition, but I don't think that Adobe Acrobat "sees" anything. Frankly, my intuition is much more that the Optophone (which actually has optical sensors) "sees" something than that an LLM or Adobe (which do not have optical sensors) "sees" anything. But as I said, I don't object to a functionalist use of "seeing" to describe what an LLM does - rather, it seems to me that having an actual optical sensor makes a difference, which is where I want to draw a distinction. Think of it as the difference between someone who reads a work of fiction and a blind person who reads a work of fiction in Braille. They both could answer all of the same questions about the text; it would not follow that the blind person could see.
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