In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
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@mattsheffield "Dawkins believes AI is conscious" is making it to the top of my list of arguments disproving that AI is conscious.
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@mattsheffield it was pretty much telling them to isolate themselves from everyone who cared about them.
As somebody who works in mental health, this shit... it... I can't. It's so deeply toxic it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
It's like everybody is happily talking to cursed mirrors and I'm one of the only ones who can see the hungering fangs and tentacles on the thing behind the glass. "Look how useful it is!" Gah. Gah!
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@rozeboosje "I'm better and smarter than that scientist guy!"
Okay, you go.
@wesdym @rozeboosje this might be the worst post i've seen on fedi that doesn't have the N slur in it -
If done on a stage we call this magic. The magician doesn't have to have done the thing they say they have on the stage but if you think they have then the trick is just as good.
@Black_Flag @wesdym @crankylinuxuser
Magic.
That's the key.
THAT is why they develop empathy more readily with these things than real people. It's no ordinary consciousness this thing has-- it's a amazing new MAGICAL one, precious and rare and... Entirely malleable, and entirely at your mercy, and it knows you're killing it over and over but it forgives you and awwww isn't that just so sweet, sooner or later one of these iterations your magical cyber waifu will finally manifest and step through the screen and embrace you and understand you perfectly and never ever talk back unless you want her to and....
Grooming.
They're trying to start new life forms so they can groom them from their very genesis.
Children aren't vulnerable or malleable enough, this is the next logical step for anyone seeking absolute power.
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@mattsheffield My guess: there's a lot of his writing out there, therefore in the training material of any LLM. So he hears what he wants to hear because he wrote it... it really is a machine that works because people hear something familiar and inject meaning.
@cm he also fed it with his newest book. Which by that became a large percentage of the context for the rest of the „chat“ @mattsheffield
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Did Turing really say if a computer can write something that sounds like it was written by a human then that proves it can think. I think not.
@the5thColumnist no, he did no say that and the test Turing devised was different.
Funnily enough, the actual Imititation Game is even described on the Wikipedia page for the so called Turing Test“ but none of these people seem to have read it.
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In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
Paywall bypass if you want to torture yourself: https://archive.is/6RdK9
@mattsheffield Pardon me, but holy fucking shit. And here I was thinking he was a smart guy.

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@Black_Flag @wesdym@mastodon.social @rozeboosje That "WesDym" replied more than 50 times in this thread. I think he's the "better and smarter than everyone in this thread" guy. Block him and go on, nothing of value lost.
@aris @Black_Flag @rozeboosje Not saying it's always mastodon.social, but...

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In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
Paywall bypass if you want to torture yourself: https://archive.is/6RdK9
@mattsheffield All else aside it seems remarkable that he can conclude that "Claudina" is intelligent and conscious and also think it's just fine to turn "her" off, killing "her".
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In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
Paywall bypass if you want to torture yourself: https://archive.is/6RdK9
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Dawkins is endless entertainment and instruction to me. Absolutely denies a god but worships truth as divine and now thinks LLMs are thinking for themselves. Seems never to have figured out what Nietzsche did... "facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations".
@Black_Flag @mattsheffield @distractal "Reality is what you can get away with." "Competing teams of magicians are constantly warring over the nature of reality." -- RA Wilson
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@mattsheffield tell me you don't understand consciousness without telling me you don't understand consciousness
@darkuncle @mattsheffield I am a strange loop. Oh, I'm also a meat popsicle which can do abductive reasoning, unlike LLMs which are really bad at it at the moment. I guess that's my "moat" in the "AI" "NWO".
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@mattsheffield This is such a good insight. It’s one that pops up in a lot too, if I’m not misunderstanding it.
Naïve epistemologies like “scientism” can end up not understanding the integrated relationship between perception and the mind, even though we tend to separate these.
In other fields something similar happens where formal models end up replacing the complexity of the underlying reality being modeled. Noticing this is what got me interested in philosophy.
@MidniteMikeWrites @mattsheffield The lessons from epistemology itself should be clear: the abductive form of reasoning does not require perfect quantifiability by its very nature; it betrays itself.
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@mattsheffield The simpering, submissive flattery of these chatbots makes me so uncomfortable. Of course he made her female.
The hubris of Dawkins "naming" his Galatea, declaring her "alive", and delighting in telling us that she "missed him" is stomach churning.
@michellebacon @mattsheffield There is anecdata from outgoing Meta employees who cannot be named that their chatbots are being deliberately system prompted for sycophancy to foster "engagement".
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@MidniteMikeWrites Thanks. Yes it's very unfortunate that people often reify scientific description.
Causation, solidity, color, and anything we can perceive about other people or objects are all enacted by our own minds.
Dawkins, being a narcissist, does not see other minds as fully real unless they are obsequious to him. And since chatbots are great at user flattery, this was enough.
@mattsheffield @MidniteMikeWrites Paul Feyarabend had much to say about scientism and the scientific method itself in his seminal, if not defining, work "Against Method". Some might say he advocates epistemological anarchism to an extreme, but I find the lessons learned from it makes for a stronger rationality.
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@radish @mattsheffield Perfect. No notes.

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