An Alarming Number of Gen Z Ai Users Think It's Conscious

An alarming number of Hollywood screenwriters believe consciousness (sapience, self awareness, etc.) is a measurable thing or a switch we can flip.
At best consciousness is a sorites paradox. At worst, it doesn't exist and while meat brains can engage in sophisticated cognitive processes, we're still indistinguishable from p-zombies.
I think the latter is more likely, and will reveal itself when AGI (or genetically engineered smat animals) can chat and assemble flat furniture as well as humans can.
(On mobile. Will add definition links later.)
- I'd rather not break down a human being to the same level of social benefit as an appliance.
  Perception is one thing, but the idea that these things can manipulate and misguide people who are fully invested in whatever process they have, irks me.
  I've been on nihilism hill. It sucks. I think people, and living things garner more genuine stimulation than a bowl full of matter or however you want to boil us down.
  Oh, people can be bad, too. There's no doubting that, but people have identifiable motives. What does an Ai "want?"
  whatever it's told to.

Same generation who takes astrology seriously, I’m shocked

I wish philosophy was taught a bit more seriously.
An exploration on the philosophical concepts of simulacra and eidolons would probably change the way a lot of people view LLMs and other generative AI.

I think an alarming number of Gen Z internet folks find it funny to skew the results of anonymous surveys.
- Yeah, what is it with GenZ? Millenials would never skew the results of anonymous surveys

Lots of people lack critical thinking skills

If they mistake those electronic parrots for conscious intelligencies, they probably won't be the best judges for rating such things.

I’ve been hearing a lot about gen z using them for therapists, and I find that really sad and alarming.
AI is the ultimate societal yes man. It just parrots back stuff from our digital bubble because it’s trained on that bubble.
- Chatgpt disagrees that it's a yes-man:
  To a certain extent, AI is like a societal “yes man.” It reflects and amplifies patterns it's seen in its training data, which largely comes from the internet—a giant digital mirror of human beliefs, biases, conversations, and cultures. So if a bubble dominates online, AI tends to learn from that bubble.
  But it’s not just parroting. Good AI models can analyze, synthesize, and even challenge or contrast ideas, depending on how they're used and how they're prompted. The danger is when people treat AI like an oracle, without realizing it's built on feedback loops of existing human knowledge—flawed, biased, or brilliant as that may be.

to be honest they probably wish it was conscious because it has more of a conscience than conservatives and capitalists

An Alarming Number of Anyone Believes Fortune Cookies
Just ... accept it, superstition is in human nature. When you take religion away from them, they need something, it'll either be racism/fascism, or expanding conscience via drugs, or belief in UFOs, or communism at least, but they need something.
The last good one was the digital revolution, globalization, world wide web, all that, no more wars (except for some brown terrorists, but the rest is fine), everyone is free and civilized now (except for those with Ptin as president and other such types, but it's just an imperfect democracy don't you worry), SG-1 series.
Anything changing our lives should have an intentionally designed religious component, or humans will improvise that where they shouldn't.

It's likely they don't know what the word "conscious" means
- In fairness, the word "conscious" has a range of meanings. For some, it is synonymous with certain religious ideas. They would be alarmed by the "heresy". For others, it is synonymous to claiming that some entity is entitled to the same fundamental rights as a human being. Those would be quite alarmed by the social implications. Few people use the term in a strictly empiricist sense.
- Their consciousness is arguable to begin with
  
  Everyone's is, fellow p-zombie
  
  "Hohohoho these young people are so dumb" Repeating exactly what we all collectively hate about boomers and x

Why are you booing them? They're right.

The LLM peddlers seem to be going for that exact result. That's why they're calling it "AI". Why is this surprising that non-technical people are falling for it?
- That's why they're calling it "AI".
  That's not why. They're calling it AI because it is AI. AI doesn't mean sapient or conscious.
  Edit: look at this diagram if you're still unsure:
  
  The I implies intelligence; of which there is none because it's not sentient. It's intentionally deceptive because it's used as a marketing buzzword.
  
  In the general population it does. Most people are not using an academic definition of AI, they are using a definition formed from popular science fiction.
  
  I'm not gonna lie, most people like you are afraid to entertain the idea of AI being conscious because it makes you look at your own consciousness as not being all that special or unique.
  Do you believe in spirits, souls, or god genes?
- You don't have to be tech person to see through bullshit. Any person with mid level expertise can test the limits of the current LLM capabilities. It can't provide consistently objectively correct outputs. It is still a useful tool though.
  
  Mid level expertise in basically anything may be out of reach for younger gen z given the state of the education systems they lived through and the business practices that no longer prioritize training or continuing education. Assuming they can get hired at all when everyone is only hiring senior staff

This is an angle I've never considered before, with regards to a future dystopia with a corrupt AI running the show. AI might never advance beyond what it is in 2025, but because people believe it's a supergodbrain, we start putting way too much faith in its flawed output, and it's our own credulity that dismantles civilisation rather than a runaway LLM with designs of its own. Misinformation unwittingly codified and sanctified by ourselves via ChatGeppetto.
The call is coming from inside the ~~house~~ mechanical Turk!
- That's the intended effect. People with real power think this way: "where it does work, it'll work and not bother us with too much initiative and change, and where it doesn't work, we know exactly what to do, so everything is covered". Checks and balances and feedbacks and overrides and fallbacks be damned.
  Humans are apes. When an ape gets to rule an empire, it remains an ape and the power kills its ability to judge.
- They call it hallucinations like it's a cute brain fart, and "Agentic" means they're using the output of one to be the input of another, which has access to things and can make decisions and actually fuck things up. It's a complete fucking shit show. But humans are expensive so replacing them makes line go up.
- I mean, it's like none of you people ever consider how often humans are wrong when criticizing AI.
  How often have you looked for information from humans and have been fed falsehoods as though they were true? It happens so much we've just gotten used to filtering out the vast majority of human responses because most of them are incorrect or unrelated to the subject.

Why are we so quick to assume machines cannot achieve consciousness?
Unless you can point to me the existence of a spirit or soul, there's nothing that makes our consciousness unique from what computers are capable of accomplishing.
- This is not claiming machines cannot be conscious ever. This is claiming machines aren't conscious right now.
  LLMs are like databases with a huge list of distances allowing you to find the "shortest" (aka most likely) distance to the next word. It's literally little more than that.
  One day true AI might exist. One day perhaps.... But not today.
- I don't doubt the possibility but current AI tech, no.
  
  It’s barely even AI. The amount of faith people have in these glorified search engines and image generators Lmao

Lots of attacks on Gen Z here, some points valid about the education that they were given from the older generations (yet it's their fault somehow). Good thing none of the other generations are being fooled by AI marketing tactics, right?
The debate on consciousness is one we should be having, even if LLMs themselves aren't really there. If you're new to the discussion, look up AI safety and the alignment problem. Then realize that while people think it's about preparing for a true AGI with something akin to consciousness and the dangers that we could face, we have have alignment problems without an artificial intelligence. If we think a machine (or even a person) is doing things because of the same reasons we want them done, and they aren't but we can't tell that, that's an alignment problem. Everything's fine until they follow their goals and the goals suddenly line up differently than ours. And the dilemma is - there's not any good solutions.
But back to the topic. All this is not the fault of Gen Z. We built this world the way it is and raised them to be gullible and dependent on technology. Using them as a scapegoat (those dumb kids) is ignoring our own failures.
- This. I also see lots of things feeling like "oooooh these young people!" Also covid would have been gen alpha. Gen Z is mostly in their 20s now
- Not the fault of prior generations, either. They were raised by their parents, and them by their parents, and so on.
  Sometime way back there was a primordial multicellular life form that should have known better.
  
  The main point here (which I think is valid despite my status as a not in this group Gen Z) is that we're still like really young? I'm 20 dude, it's just not my or my friends fault that school failed us. The fact it failed us was by design and despite my own and others complaints it's continued to fail the next generation and alpha is already, very clearly struggling. I really just don't think there's much ground to argue about how Gen Z by and large should somehow know better. The whole point of the public education system is to ensure we well educate our children, it's simply not my or any child's fault that school is failing to do so. Now that I'm an adult I can, and I do push for improved education but clearly people like me don't have our priorities straight seeing who got elected...
  
  That's a bit of a reach. We should have stayed in the trees though, but the trees started disappearing and we had to change.

They also are the dumbest generation with a COVID education handicap and the least technological literacy in terms of mechanics comprehension. They have grown up with technology that is refined enough to not need to learn troubleshooting skills past "reboot it".
How they don't understand that a LLM can't be conscious is not surprising. LLMs are a neat trick, but far from anything close to consciousness or intelligence.
- How they don't understand that a LLM can't be conscious is not surprising
  It's because they're all atheists! They don't know that souls are granted to humans by the gods.
- Have fun with your back problems!
  
  It will happen to YOU!

At some point in the mid-late 1990s, I recall having a (technically-inclined) friend who dialed up to a BBS and spent a considerable amount of time pinging and then chatting with Lisa, the "sysadmin's sister". When I heard about it, I spent quite some time arguing with him that Lisa was a bot. He was pretty convinced that she was human.
http://bbs.hmvh.net/hmvh/lisa/LISA.HTM
http://textfiles.com/bbs/install.txt
- Honestly, I welcome this future.
  I'd rather discuss with bots at this point than rubes.

I wasn't aware the generation of CEOs and politicians was called "Gen Z".
- We have to make the biggest return on our investments, fr fr
- The article targets its study on Gen Z but.... yeah, the elderly aren't exactly winners here, either.

That's a matter of philosophy and what a person even understands "consciousness" to be. You shouldn't be surprised that others come to different conclusions about the nature of being and what it means to be conscious.
- Consciousness is an emergent property, generally self awareness and singularity are key defining features.
  There is no secret sauce to llms that would make them any more conscious than Wikipedia.
  
  secret sauce
  What would such a secret sauce look like? Like, what is it in humans, for example?
  
  Consciousness comes from the soul, and souls are given to us by the gods. That's why AI isn't conscious.
- If it was actually AI sure.
  This is an unthinking machine algorithm chewing through mounds of stolen data.
  
  What is thought?
  
  To be fair, so am i
  
  That is certainly one way to view it. One might say the same about human brains, though.
- Are we really going to devil's advocate for the idea that avoiding society and asking a language model for life advice is okay?
  
  No, but thinking about whether it's conscious is an independent thing.
  
  It's not devil's advocate. They're correct. It's purely in the realm of philosophy right now. If we can't define "consciousness" (spoiler alert: we can't), then it makes it impossible to determine with certainty one way or another. Are you sure that you yourself are not just fancy auto-complete? We're dealing with shit like the hard problem of consciousness and free will vs determinism. Philosophers have been debating these issues for millennia and were not much closer to a consensus yet than we were before.
  And honestly, if the CIA's papers on The Gateway Analysis from Project Stargate about consciousness are even remotely correct, we can't rule it out. It would mean consciousness preceeds matter, and support panpsychism. That would almost certainly include things like artificial intelligence. In fact, then the question becomes if it's even "artificial" to begin with if consciousness is indeed a field that pervades the multiverse. We could very well be tapping into something we don't fully understand.

The machines in Detroit: Become Human are not alive, its a corporate botnet.
The "Androids win" ending is a bad ending. They will will vote in favor of corporate interests, since they are secretly controlled by the elites.
- Looks like the androids won in real life.

Keep up the politeness. It's costing Altman real money... 😂
- The batshit insane part of that is they could just make easy canned answers for thank yous, but nope...IT'S THE USER'S FAULT!
  edit: To the mass downvoting prick who is too cowardly to comment, whats it like to be best friends with a calculator?
  
  One would think if they're as fucking smart as they believe they are they could figger a way around it, eh??? 🤣

I tried to explain a directory tree to one of them (a supposedly technical resource) for twenty minutes and failed. They're idiots. They were ruined by baby tech like iPhones, iPads, and now AI.
- I'm assuming part of it is because you're a bad teacher as well.
  Just going off of my life experience, I notice the vast majority of people are bad at teaching and then blame the pupil.
  
  I'm not a teacher. I thought I was in a design meeting not teaching remedial computers to someone who is supposed to be producing designs.
  Just going off of my life experience, I notice that people pretend up a set of credentials, have large gaps in knowledge, and won't admit they don't know things.
- Anyone can understand a directory tree. Not everyone is smart enough to explain it.
  
  They were designing functionality that contained directory trees and didn't understand directory trees. How is it my responsibility that this person is not qualified to do their own job?

Its a friend the way the nice waitress is a friend when you go eat out.

Those lovable little simpletons.
- Irony.
- Are we positive that they're conscious? I just think we should run some tests.
  
  Good question. Over the years, I've read a number of arguments about consciousness, or more precisely against machine consciousness. One thing that's striking is that the authors never apply the same logic to themselves or humans in general. It's like they completely lack self-awareness. If I took the whole "p-zombie" idea seriously, I'd look for such p-zombies. And these philosophers would be my first candidates.

Whatever, couldn't it also be that a technical consciousness will look rather different from what we assume? There are obviously less/none of some factors, ie emotional intelligence etc. But a tech super intelligence, if ever reached, may have a number of unexpected problems for us. We should concentrate on unexpected outcomes and establish safeguards.

The world is going to be absolutely fucked when the older engineers and techies who built all this modern shit and/or maintain it and still understand it all retire or die off.
- That has been likely said multiple times throughout history, yet here we are.
  
  To be fair, we also keep getting closer to being absolutely fucked. Not necessarily for that reason, though.

Not sure what's alarming about that. It's a bit early to worry about an AI Dred Scott, no?
- It's alarming people are so gullible that a glorified autocorrect can fool them into thinking it's sapient
  
  "how dare you insult my robot waifu?!"
  
  Is it still passing the Turing test if you don't think either one is human?