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  • Anthropic’s new Claude 4 features an aspect that may be cause for concern.
  • The company’s latest safety report says the AI model attempted to “blackmail” developers.
  • It resorted to such tactics in a bid of self-preservation.
  • Plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    516·
    1 month ago

    I know how LLMs work.

    There’s only one thing you mentioned there that is actually used as a basis to qualify or disqualify sentience: whether it feels or not.

    How do you know it doesn’t feel? How do we define feeling for an entity that is inherently non biological?

    I could make the argument that humans also merely mimic their training data, ie the values and behaviors we are taught by society, parents etc.

    I have not been convinced that they aren’t sentient with this argument.

    • theparadox@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 month ago

      Yes, both systems - the human brain and an LLM - assimilate and organize human written languages in order to use it for communication. An LLM is very little else beyond this. It is then given rules (using those written languages) and then designed to create more related words when given input. I just don’t find it convincing that an ML algorithm designed explicitly to mimic human written communication in response to given input “understands” anything. No matter *how convincingly" an algorithm might reproduce a human voice - perfectly matching intonation and inflexion when given text to read - if I knew it was an algorithm designed to do it as convincingly as possible I wouldn’t say it was capable of the feeling it is able to express.

      The only thing in favor of sentience is that the ML algorithms modify themselves and end up being a black box - so complex with no way to represent them that they are impossible for humans to comprehend. Could it somehow have achieved sentience? Technically, yes, because we don’t understand how they work. We are just meat machines, after all.