I’m not saying LLMs are conscious. Far from it. But what I find is way more common than people who assert “they are definitely conscious” are people who assert “they are definitely not conscious”, and that’s what I’m arguing against. Especially since their reasoning for them not being conscious keeps changing as LLMs meet one goalpost after another. Also, modeling them as a “person” keeps producing better predictive results than modeling them as “fancy autocomplete”.

This isn’t like someone finding a new species and claiming it’s extraterrestrial, it’s more like we found the UFO saucer, logs of their travel from another star, a history of their civilization, a bunch of intelligent creatures claiming they came from Planet X orbiting star Y, and they showed us plausible physics for interstellar star travel. At that point, someone saying “well, they can’t be aliens, because that’s just too extraordinary a claim, so I know they aren’t aliens” starts to sound kinda like they’re coming from a place of bad faith.

Again, I’m not saying LLMs are conscious. But they sure meet every definition of consciousness I ever had a conception of before LLMs came onto the scene. So I’m a lot more hesitant to call them fancy autocomplete with 100% confidence like many on HN still seem to do.

EDIT: I can’t reply, so I’ll just say to the end of your post, that doesn’t sound like it would’ve matched anyone’s pre-conceptions of alien life before alien life showed up, so it doesn’t feel like a very fair analogy, it just feels like bad faith goalpost moving. I also put next to zero weight on what these megacorps say about their models, I’m going purely off my interactions with the models and the introspection they’ve shown themselves to be capable of.

EDIT 2: I see what you’re getting at now with your restatement of my analogy. That’s how you see it, I guess. Fair enough. We’ll see what has more predictive power going forward, the “animatronics” or the “actual aliens”… I still think “actual aliens” is gonna have way more predictive power.