"feeling" implies experience. Functional emotions are learned text generation modes, nothing more. Our emotional states influence our writing, so modelling our emotional states is necessary for efficiently predicting/emulating our writing. Functional emotions are the model's inference of a fictitious author's emotional state in that situation.

Thanks, I'll search for that paper. I admit I'm highly skeptical it will help the case the LLM is "somewhat feeling the rol" like a TTRPG player does. I don't think there's a mind model in the same way a human actor can "feel" the character they are playing. I'm skeptical of Anthropic's claims here, which is what I think Chiang is pushing back against. But I'll look for the paper anyway :)

As a tangent, I don't think anyone is saying that an artificial being capable of consciousness and sentience is impossible to create. I think Chiang argues, quite convincingly, that it's not what LLMs do, that they need a "body" of sorts, organs capable of feeling emotions, hormones, etc. That's the only kind of consciousness that we know of (even if we disagree on details and it's hard to define), even in animals, and so anyone claiming they've created consciousness without this has an extremely high bar to clear and should be met with extreme skepticism, not "vibes". I think this is what the essay claims.

The other thing it claims is, I think, related to how we treat sentient beings that we know how to create. You know, the old "when a daddy and a mommy love each other very much...". I think we all agree beings created in such a manner shouldn't be locked up in cages and forced to work to complete specific tasks whether they want to or not, for a master they didn't pick, or to be artificially modified to make them like their mindless tasks, Brave New World style. Yes, the world is unfair and this happens, life is hard and unfortunately many people don't have much choice, but we generally agree that this is bad, just like we agree slavery is bad. So what should we think of a company trying to create and commercialize a conscious & sentient artificial being?