Pope Leo XIV: "AI poses new challenges re: human dignity, justice and labour"

Re:Pope Leo XIV: "AI poses new challenges re: human dignity,... by protocolture on Sunday May 11, 2025 @03:58AM (#43952187)

>LLMs do not think.

Words can have multiple meanings. Feet can be the things on the end of legs, or a unit of measurement.

LLMs process data in a more intelligent manner than previous systems. The solution, whatever it is, is presented in a thoughtful manner to the system operator. "Thinking" seems like a pretty convenient term for the process. It doesn't have to imply sentience or sapience.

Its the same with "Learning" or "Training" these models aren't actually learning, and they certainly aren't being trained. But these words are convenient shorthand that conveys a similar process.

The battle for language prescriptivists isn't just to ban a certain use of a word, its to find a convenient alternative. I dont see any here.

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Re:Pope Leo XIV: "AI poses new challenges re: human dignity,... by nopelynopington on Sunday May 11, 2025 @04:18AM (#43952270)

Ok perhaps "LLMs are not conscious" would have been a more solid footing

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Re:Pope Leo XIV: "AI poses new challenges re: human dignity,... by amanaplanacanal on Sunday May 11, 2025 @06:06AM (#43952700)

Although true, consciousness itself doesn't seem to be unique among humans. The other mammals certainly appear to experience qualia just as much as we do, and at least some birds act suspiciously like they are conscious too.

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Re:Pope Leo XIV: "AI poses new challenges re: human dignity,... by nopelynopington on Sunday May 11, 2025 @08:41AM (#43953397)

No, I agree, I think lots of animals have consciousness. I don't consider it to be uniquely human. But LLMs do not have it.

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Re:Pope Leo XIV: "AI poses new challenges re: human dignity,... by akshitgaur2005 on Sunday May 11, 2025 @01:31PM (#43955347)

And what do you think is the differentiator between the two? What is it that birds can do that you posit AI won't be able to do?

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Re:Pope Leo XIV: "AI poses new challenges re: human dignity,... by nopelynopington on Sunday May 11, 2025 @02:05PM (#43955637)

Again just to be clear, I'm not saying that AI can never or will never be conscious, or think. I'm saying LLMs (which are currently being mislabeled as AI) are not conscious intellects.

They are, at their core, predictive text engines.

And this is is just my opinion, yours may of course differ. Maybe you believe humans are just predictive text engines

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Re:Pope Leo XIV: "AI poses new challenges re: human dignity,... by baobun on Monday May 12, 2025 @05:39PM (#43967711)

Nobody made the claim that consciousness is measurable. It's not necessarily about capabilities.

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Re:Pope Leo XIV: "AI poses new challenges re: human dignity,... by protocolture on Monday May 12, 2025 @01:26AM (#43959891)

Thats fair.

Not on topic, but I dont think thats going to be relevant.

If a human thinks something is conscious, and feels bad if it gets hurt, it will probably get treated as such.

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Re:Pope Leo XIV: "AI poses new challenges re: human dignity,... by spwa4 on Sunday May 11, 2025 @08:50AM (#43953453)

Why should it be unique among proteins? Bags of water and proteins famously behave in extremely statistically predictable ways on a cellular level ... and are conscious. Animals and humans are nothing but a lot of those bags. Ok ... a very large number. I also have a Msc in statitstics, which tells me a combination of a large number of statistically predictable variables is itself a statistically predictable variable.

So why couldn't a large collection of statistical variables be conscious? Mathematically, it's the same thing.

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