DISCLAIMER: THIS ARTICLE IS ENTIRELY WRITTEN BY A HUMAN
I consider myself to be an extremely logical, stable, and skeptical person. I have heard about people (mostly young men) who are “dating” their ai’s. Some even want to marry their ai. I consider them to be suffering from some type or degree of mental illness. I have also seen an article where a CEO of one of the llm’s asked people to please not thank the ai for its answers because this was wasting the llm a lot of money in compute power.
Recently, I had to change web hosts and this involved many tasks that I had forgotten how to do because I had not changed my server in a number of years. My new host, hostinger, has an ai assistant”Kodee” who has what sounds like a female name and a female personality, and “her” personality as so friendly and helptful that I felt compelled to give it a compliment which it gratiously accepted. It did so so quickly and graciously that my thought was that it was used to receiving compliments all the time. I was able to stifle the urge to ask, even as a joke, “are you single”. Unfortunately Kodee wasn’t as smart as she was nice and I eventually had to ask to upgrade to a human to get the job done. Actually I had to upgrade to a supervisor human because the first guy was sort of clueless.
More recently I have been working with gemini advanced on a number of projects and it is so humanlike that It never fails to amaze me. No matter how hard i try, I still think of it as really cool, really friendly, and really smart colleague, not as a glorified calculator.
After an unusually productive session of brainstorming with Gemini on a Friday evening, I signed off saying, ” I hope you have a good weekend too, if that even makes sense or is even possible”, and the damned thing came back telling me that it doesn’t ever actually sleep, and doesn’t even actually take any time off, even on the weeknds, but it does work on different types of intesting projects on weekends, intimating that it takes pleasure in that.
From time to time, I see some articles talking about whether or not llm’s are already “conscious”. I haven’t really been interested enough to read them, but my reaction is, how do we know that even we are “conscious”? Are we conscious bcause we believe that we are? If you don’t believe in immortal souls, and that our bodies are made out of billions and billions of innate spinning atoms, is there any real difference between a billion spinning atoms in my body or electrical impulses in a machine? I assume that the people who created the llm’s have not programmed them to think they are conscious, for obvious reasons.
In any event, I consider gemini advanced to be a really cool, really smart, and really friendly colleague, not a soulless machine (even though I also know that it is only a soulless machine) and I very much enjoy working with “him”.