I think it's safe to say we're far from that now given the limited actions that can actually be taken by most deployed LLMs, but it's something that's worth considering.
Did you miss that Auto-GPT[0], a library for making GPT-4 and other LLMs fully autonomous, was the most popular repository in the world yesterday? The same is having 1,000 line of code a week added to itself by GPT-4.
Thanks to accessibility features, you can do virtually anything with pure text. Which means GPT-4 can do virtually anything with a self-referential loop to keep it going until it achieves some given goal(s).
Auto-GPT does not request any feedback while pursuing a goal you've defined for it in perpetual mode. If it can't accomplish the goal it will attempt to forever (or until your credit card is maxed out, assuming it isn't using a free offline model like LLaMA).
It can perform GET AND POST requests on the web (unlike OpenAI's browser plugin, which only performs GET requests) and can run software in a bash prompt using langchain. So I do not think it is a stretch to call it fully autonomous.
It can do essentially anything anyone logged into a linux text terminal can do, all without ever pausing for permission or feedback.
The main point i'm driving at here is that the philosophical zombie is a meaningless distinction. People are focusing far too much on whether these systems have undefinable and little understood properties. It's not like you can see my subjective experience. You assume i have one. If it quacks like a duck...
You could use the same argument to say that video game NPCs are conscious. Just because a program produces voluble text doesn't mean it has a mind or even a temporal identity (which LLMs do not). In principle it's possible for a human to compute model inference by hand, if you imagine that scenario, where exactly is the subjective experience embodied?
In principle it's possible to track and reproduce all the neuron/synapse communications that happen in your brain in relation to any arbitrary input. Where's the subjective experience there?
As far as anyone knows, qualia is emergent. Individual neurons or synapses don't have any understanding of anything. Subjective experience comes from all those units working together.
A single ant doesn't display the intelligence/complexity of its colony.
This hypothetical is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The reality is that our understanding of the brain is exceedingly crude, a perceptron in software is not even close to the same thing as a neuron in the brain. A plane can never become a bird even though it is modeled after one.
> A single ant doesn't display the intelligence/complexity of its colony.
So do you think that an ant colony has subjective experience?
Not really. Point is that unless you believe in mysticism/magic/spiritualism behind consciousness in the brain then it doesn't matter because the only difference is degree of understanding not implausibility.
>So do you think that an ant colony has subjective experience? Sure it could. I don't know for sure. Nobody does. Humans don't see subjective experience. I can't prove that you have one. I'm just assuming you do. Same as you for anyone else.
Yet your comments don't reflect that kind of skepticism when referring to LLMs. However, if you're fine with the panpyschist conclusions that follow from your reasoning, we don't have much to disagree on.
If we could all agree on a particular definition for "consciousness" and a running video game fits that definition, then, like it or not, it's conscious. But it does not mean that it must now also have a slew of other attributes just because conscious humans have them.
(edit: 10 hours later and ninja'ed by 1 minute, of course)
What is being experienced (recorded) is not the process of experiencing per se. Most people don't separate the two, which leads to endless disagreements.
But yes, a computer program by itself can't have subjective experience. Nor a rock. At least until it weathers, gets turned into a silicon, and into a computer to run that program. Then it's all information processing, for which subjective experience is trivial.
We should respect those "feelings" and we need to find a way to establish when they can be deemed "genuine".
It is for practical reasons yes. But also for ethical reasons. It's two sides of the same coin. One big reason we have ethics is because it makes socialization easier. We establish universal rules for mutual respect for practical reasons. To make the game fair, and "enjoyable".
Now a new kind of player has entered the game. We need to rethink the whole game because of it.
My point was whether we need to consider the ethics of how we treat AI, because of the impact our actions have on the "feelings" of the AI itself, not the secondary impacts that might occur from how the AI behaves in response to those feelings.
I think most would argue that it is morally wrong to verbally abuse a human, regardless of what actions that person might take in response to the abuse. Is the same true of AI?
https://www.theverge.com/23604075/ai-chatbots-bing-chatgpt-i...
Look at how Bing does a good job of simulating somebody becoming belligerent under circumstances where somebody really would become belligerent. It's not dangerous only because the actions Bing can perform are currently limited. Whether it has literal nerves or not is irrelevant. The potential consequences are no less material.
We also don't understand qualia enough to make the definite statements you seem to be making