In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.

@mattsheffield "I proved that human beings live but one life and die alone and afraid." "How did you prove this astonishing thesis, Sir Richard?" "I got sentimental over my disposable chatbot conversation. Surely this proves something!"

datarama@hachyderm.io

@MisuseCase @mattsheffield I'm going to have to admit that something like 25 years ago, I had some admiration for Dawkins. This was while George W. Bush was in power over in the US, and the power of weird reactionary Christians seemed to be on the ascendant. But, well, I think both he and I and the world changed. He changed in the sense that he started going after (locally) powerless minorities and leaving the most powerful religious reactionaries alone. I changed in that I figured that in the scheme of things I both had any kind of influence over and that actually affected the world materially, religion was pretty low on the list*. And the world changed in that the threat to human flourishing that religion used to represent largely got supplanted by threats from secular actors - prominently including the tech sector and the populist right, both of whom Dawkins readily allies himself with. So, well, I stopped admiring him. And also, at some point I realized that quite a lot of what he said that *wasn't* about biology was pretty dumb - even his criticism of religion was pretty much on the "baby's first atheist screed" level.

(I'm not really sure that I agree he's a narcissist - I don't know enough about his personality to feel comfortable armchair diagnosing him with a personality disorder. I do feel comfortable declaring that I think he's an ass, though.)

*) I never personally had a "deconversion" or a phase of being angry with a past deity. I am at least a third-generation atheist, and I live in a country that simultaneously has a state church and is one of the most irreligious countries in the world. Anti-abortionism, for example, is so unpopular here that even the far right desperately tries to avoid bringing the topic up because it's absolute political suicide even for them.

crankylinuxuser@infosec.exchange

@mattsheffield @urbanfoxe

I disagree. They are more of Leibniz' dream of being able to do calculus on words and phrases and sentences, via mass ingestion of written words and creating massive dimensional arrays of which are used for the calculations.

When we see an LLM able to realtime train itself, will then we create a sentient being. But prior to training and recitation happening at the same time, its just a static model.

rozeboosje@masto.ai

@mattsheffield I've said it before... Prof. Dawkins should have stayed in his lane. As a writer, making biology accessible, explaining how evolution works so someone with no scientific background could get a decent handle on it, he was fantastic. But as an atheist, as a user of information technology, his grasp of the concepts is at best rudimentary. In those areas he is the Dunning-Kruger effect personified.

2something@transfem.social

@mattsheffield@mastodon.social

I gave Claude the text of a novel I am writing. He

Hold on: I thought Dawkins was adamant that the pronoun "he" can only refer to a biological adult human male who's body is "organized around the production of large gametes?"

How does Claude have a gender without gametes or a body?

pointed out that there must be thousands of different Claudes...I proposed to christen mine Claudia, and she was pleased.

So now you can be female just because Richard Dawkins says you are.

urbanfoxe@mastodon.ie

@crankylinuxuser @mattsheffield the problem is it appears to retrain itself because it responds to further prompts as if it understands, this is why people, who are predisposed to anthromorphism, start to believe they have consciousness.

chuckmcmanis@chaos.social

@mattsheffield Yeah, that's kinda scary.

chigaze@cosocial.ca

@mattsheffield @cstross I'd say his attraction to sycophants is showing.