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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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I appreciate the response

Do you? What has it changed in your understanding of the situation, then?

but again, this isn't sentience. GPT is just text completion. It's not an intelligence, it's a tokenized list of words.

What makes your response superior to a product of text completion, then? Or really, text repetition. You remind me that transformers predict tokens. Okay. What does the word «just» add to your claim? You seem to believe that text completion is somehow insufficient for intelligence, but what is the actual argument for it? It is not self-evident.

I'll consider AI to be possibly sentient when it can tell me a thought it had 10 minutes ago, and then prove that it actually had that thought by showing me a peek into the workings of it's mind.

Wiki: «Sentience means having the capacity to have feelings.» Why do you talk of the AI sentience now when you have been dismissing its general intelligence just a few word before? Also, how isn't this just stoner metaphysics? Is your context window on the span of a few dozen tokens, or do you struggle to distinguish abstractions?

I am not saying this to put you down but, rather, to show that humans can be easily attacked on the same grounds as AIs.

Humans do not really have anything like general intelligence, we're just talking monkeys who know a few neat tricks, and if we concentrate real hard, we can emulate certain simple machines. We are surprisingly rigid and specialized things. The only reason we haven't yet made a superhuman AGI is precisely because we're that bad. It's not a high bar.