AI "consciousness"
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“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” the writer Arthur C Clarke memorably said. And, yes, when they’re not hallucinating or telling you to eat rocks for dinner, AI chatbots can feel like magic. They can feel very human. But let’s go back to that idea of “stochastic parrots” from Gebru’s paper. “To parrot something is to repeat it without understanding,” says Gebru. This is essentially what LLMs are doing. “They have been taught to calculate how likely sequences of text are based on the data they were trained on.” Because they’ve been fed enormous quantities of data, these models are very sophisticated but that “doesn’t mean consciousness or understanding or anything like that”.
"Magic". Great analogy. A magician saws a person in half on stage--in front of our eyes. We saw it happen. But what didn't we see?
Good opinion piece: No, Richard Dawkins. AI is not conscious
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"Consciousness," depending on context and purpose, may or may not be desirable.
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"Chat bots" are but one of AI's many possible manifestations. There are a lot of work being done to make AI "understand." (E.g., read up on "world models.")
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With or without "understanding," with or without "consciousness," AI has taken over a lot of work that people do, and it will continue to take over more.
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