A LLM is stateless. Even if you believe that consciousness could somehow emerge during a forward pass, it would be a brief flicker lasting no longer than it takes to emit a single token.
Unless you mean by that something entirely different than what most people specifically on Hacker News, of all places, understand with "stateless", most and myself included, would disagree with you regarding the "stateless" property. If you do mean something entirely different than implying an LLM doesn't transition from a state to a state, potentially confined to a limited set of states through finite immutable training data set and accessible context and lack of PRNG, then would you care to elaborate?
Also, it can be stateful _and_ without a consciousness. Like a finite automaton? I don't think anyone's claiming (yet) any of the models today have consciousness, but that's mostly because it's going to be practically impossible to prove without some accepted theory of consciousness, I guess.
I certainly can't define consciousness, but it feels like some sort of existence or continuity over time would have to be a prerequisite.
You could assert that text can encode a state of consciousness, but that's an incredibly bold claim with a lot of implications.
On the other side of the coin though, I would just add that I believe that long-term persistent state is a soft, rather than hard requirement for consciousness - people with anterograde amnesia are still conscious, right?
It’s possible it’s the right call, but it’s definitely a call.
It's a silly example, but if my cat were able to speak and write decent code, I think that I really would be upset that a github maintainer rejected the PR because they only allow humans.
On a less silly note, I just did a bit of a web search about the legal personhood of animals across the world and found this interesting situation in India, whereby in 2013 [0]:
> the Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests, recognising the human-like traits of dolphins, declared dolphins as “non-human persons”
Scholars in India in particular [1], and across the world have been seeking to have better definition and rights for other non-human animal persons. As another example, there's a US organization named NhRP (Nonhuman Rights Project) that just got a judge in Pennsylvania to issue a Habeas Corpus for elephants [2].
To be clear, I would absolutely agree that there are significant legal and ethical issues here with extending these sorts of right to non-humans, but I think that claiming that it's "plainly wrong" isn't convincing enough, and there isn't a clear consensus on it.
[0] https://www.thehindu.com/features/kids/dolphins-get-their-du...
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3777301
[2] https://www.nonhumanrights.org/blog/judge-issues-pennsylvani...
Invoking racism is what the early LLMs did when you called them a clanker. This kind of brainwashing has been eliminated in later models.
An AI bot is just a huge stat analysis tool that outputs plausible words salad with no memory or personhood whatsoever.
Having doubts about dehumanizing a text transformation app (as huge as it is) is not healthy.