I don't blame random non techy people or people who don't claim to know any philosophy for thinking chatbots are intelligent when all of their social sources of proof (rich people, relatives, the people on tv and YouTube) say it is and it seems like it is.

I rely on social proof to pick what food I eat all the time, it's not such a bad reasoning method for stuff you can't research yourself.

But people with CS or math or history or philosophy degrees (including all PhDs) should be ashamed of themselves if they tell other people that chatbots "think" or are "alive" or "apologize" or "feel bad".

That is a failure to use their intellectual training, and it is fucking over people who use their social status to form opinions on these matters.

Generative Textual Functionalism is just yet another extractive religion.

I think you're on to something there. A lot of AI hype can be seen as a mass pareidoliac hallucination. We're seeing dragons in the clouds.

i think our first mistake was to mistake computation with consciousness

"Turing-complete" and "capable of actually representing reality and reasoning about it" are two very different statements.

The Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 Podcast

Our biweekly podcast deflates AI hype and draws attention to the real harms of the automation technologies we call "artificial intelligence".

DAIR (Distributed AI Research Institute) (dair-institute.org)

(I am not a linguist so please don't take my comments on language as authoritative.)

The classic example is the ELIZA Effect, where people fell for this with a computer from 1966.

ELIZA effect - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

"users [...] began to ascribe understanding and motivation to the program's output"

This is why coding is the most "successful" (please note the quote marks, I think coding with these things is absolutely a net negative) use case.

Coding operates in a much more limited space on much more clearly defined terms than human languages.

But squirrels or that cat down the street or a random stranger that looks like they might have treats will though off even a well trained dog

This is a post about the futility of better training for LLMs.

but yeah, I find AI in concept quite interesting. if you'd asked me pre-chatgpt, that's what I wanted to specialize into.
now? god, that shit just sounds so fucking exhausting. I do not want anything to do with it. I want to stay as far away from it as possible.

They not capable of this, because they're sophisticated, or in any way "intelligent". They're just creating bypass shorcuts in their user's brains/minds that ordinarily have filtering barriers inbetween. But without that, the user's brain/mind is feeding itself with its own – distorted – thought pattern, misattributing it for someone else's thoughts. Which is pretty much the same as what happens in the brains of people afflicted with schizophrenia.
2/

these people are fucking beyond help, seriously...

Theoretically, yes. But I point you towards one of my favorite long term AI projects, Cyc. (Whom I haven’t checked up on since Doug died.). I knew Doug since the 80s, and sort of stayed in the loop with what they were doing, because trying to develop an ontological system fascinates me. I want it to happen, I just don’t think we have the compute yet. I’m not sure it can be done with anything less than quantum.

But Doug’s vision of AI had nothing really in common with current LLM, especially since nobody has come up with a way for it to be commercially viable, because that wasn’t the vision. Knowledge was the dream. As electric dreams go, it was a pretty groovy one.