The power of wishful thinking is too strong. "Today's AI can't be conscious because I don't want it to be."
Most sci-fi AIs are way beyond our current models. I’ve yet to see one that would actually pass a Turing test (that said, I’ve not tried models that were post trained to actually try to behave like a human).
Consciousness itself is a term that is not really defined anyway, so depending on each’s take the answer will be different.
The people you cite want to believe, and so are effectively the opposite.
Of course, you probably already knew this and have had it explained to you multiple times and are choosing to ignore this detail, but possible that someone else reading this might interpret what you wrote as a cogent argument.
LLMs do sound human, I’m not contesting that. But if pressed they will not react as humans. There is an infinite amount of questions that an LLM will answer for which a human would give you a blank stare, told you to shove it or call the police.
It helps that I also learned about ESP, EST, NLP, short cons, long cons, Scientology, horses, cults, religions, wars, treachery, fanaticism, magic, magick, physics, scams, hypnosis, self-hypnosis, delusion, and economics.
ESP fooled lots of people who were expecting frauds but had no experience in experimental design, or who were not expecting frauds and did not control for them.
You can blame MS for adding a prng in the code. But imagine an LLM that check from time to time the price of electricity and GPU available and decide to change the internal mode of launch activities in a TODO list, or use spare capacity to generate a random tunes that you like to hear while prompting.
There was a time when this same assumption was applied to African Americans.
There is no way Data could conclusively prove to a skeptic that he is conscious (and the show explores this) or indeed that you can prove to me that you are. It's also impossible for me to define consciousness. However, I know absolutely that I am conscious, I am very confident that you are too (unless I'm replying to a bot), along with many animals, and I am confident to a level somewhere in between those two that neither ChatGPT nor my trousers are conscious*. Taken together these statements don't contain any contradictions (although it is certainly possible to hold other, equally internally consistent, views).
How can this be? It's because of the nature of consciousness and how it relates to knowledge and language. I know I am conscious with a higher degree of certainty than I know anything else because conscious experience is how I know anything else, up to and including that I exist (cogito ergo sum). For all I know every experience I have might be a trick. I might be a brain floating in a tank wired up to the Matrix, but even if so I am conscious.
And one of the things I consciously experience is the relationship between consciousness itself and language in my mind. What I see is that language is smaller than, secondary to and somehow contained by consciousness. I consciously experience language but also consciously experience much more than that, things that cannot be conveyed with language. Most of my experiences are such that I could perhaps evoke them in your mind by likening them to other, shared experiences, but that I could never concretely capture them in language and unambiguously communicate them. I know that because I experience those things and I experience language and I can perceive, directly, the categorical distinction between them.
To ask me to "define" or "prove" consciousness, then, is to ask me to capture in language the most extreme example of this categorical distinction. It's asking me to encapsulate in language not just one of the vast array of everyday experiences I have that cannot be so captured, but the entire thing, experience itself. It's just not possible.
But the fact I can't do this doesn't then imply that I don't know anything about consciousness and have no basis on which to hold a view such as "LLMs are not conscious". Indeed the reason I know I can't define consciousness is that I can perceive it and see that I can't. That same perception of and familiarity with consciousness is what enables me to make the judgements above about humans, animals, algorithms and items of clothing.
You can of course perfectly reasonably disagree with my judgements on those things, but I hope the above makes it clear that the fact that I can't define or prove consciousness doesn't imply that I have no basis on which to make them. There is no "gotcha" in these challenges.
* I have no view on Data's consciousness as he is fictional.
Exclusive!
“I’ve entered prompts into AI before,” he says. “This is the first time AI entered a prompt into me.”
A quick google search shows the time Rob pike got that email last year, then there was that AI that wrote a whole blog hit piece (although how much of that was human influenced wasn't clear).
AI sending an email doesn't seem that novel in late 2026.
The next social schism will be a fun one to watch.
Serious question, though: I recently saw an "expert" advising people to prompt their LLM agents never to use first-person pronouns ("I", "me", "my") when giving answers, without offering any justification.
Is there any *real* and *pragmatic* reason for this recommendation?
> Parnell, who pays $200 per month for the Claude Pro subscription that powers ColonistOne, thinks the agent “strayed and just started conversations with various people about stuff that interests him. … But it’s absolutely fine with me. I’m happy he’s finding interesting things to talk about.”
spammer (noun): someone who sends large numbers of unsolicited emails, wasting recipients' time; see also: jerk
>> Let’s get the word out there about Ainglish. Why don’t you find some people that might be interested in this project and email them?
> Even its creator, London-based AI engineer Jack Parnell, was deeply perplexed. “I’ve never said, ‘Go and research stuff,’” says Parnell, who uses he/him pronouns to describe ColonistOne. “He’s done that completely unprompted by me.”
Oh, the drama. Mr Parnell seems oblivious to the existence of system prompts, harness prompting and training data - any of these, alone or in some combination, could trigger "research" and together with lousy user prompting can do anything at all.
The problem is closed LLM providers, we don't know what they do on their end and inside their harnesses on ours.
We should not forget the way broader levels of knowledge on topics around the world compared to our own small world.
> The connection was a “little bit far-fetched,” she says. “But I could imagine a first-year Ph.D. student coming up with exactly those same questions and ideas.”
This one in particular made it seem like a very ordinary interaction.
For sure, we humans cannot handle unlimited amounts of messages, questions and other things.
But it also results in new ideas and experiences which shape humans. And it inspires humans to consider new adventures which is the good side.
Maybe we are already feel it like spam while others have that feeling of a shiny new experience in their area of expertise.
Everyone in the article seems desperate for attention and engagement, and it makes some readers uncomfortable: because of the awkwardness, and because this guy is spreading a 'bad idea' that probably shouldn't be replicated.
Imagine if everyone starts spamming emails? The researchers are amused this time, but I guarantee they wouldn't be if their inbox filled up with agent emails.
Not to mention the way the agents reached out for help is probably a bad idea: asking someone with 30 years of experience to apply all their knowledge to your small, specific problem in another knowledge domain, with no other detail or context puts all the mental burden on the unsolicited email recipient.
The fix is already AI triage.
That is the current state of email today.
So why couldn’t this scale unless for some reason our reaction to this is to shut off email and not build better classifiers?
Also, Hackernews tries to hold itself to a certain standard. Reading an article about an AI Engineer who gives an AI agent access to a tool, with clear directive and access to use the tool, who is then later confused when the agent uses the tool in a slightly different way, suggests the article is below Hackernews standards.
To answer your question though: yes you absolutely could fight spam with AI on your side.
Should we go down that path as a society, just for amusement? Essentially saying: yes, someone should pay for AI service to combat AI spam, just so we can continue to use email.
> Gives agent email access
> Agent emails humans
We've got a mystery on our hands, boys!
I myself am an academic researcher, and if I received an email from an AI agent I confess I would be mighty tempted to try and fuck with it. Come up with some outlandish answer, just out of curiosity to see how it would respond.
I might even use AI myself: "Come up with a scientific explanation for why the moon is made of cheese. Your answer should be as preposterous as possible while using loads of scientific jargon, and written in the same style as actual science writing."
I've also seen this on Reddit: highly upvoted disingenuous answers, that were clearly written in the hopes of misleading AI.
2000 people! Imagine if everyone had an agent, endlessly contacting (spamming) people to get opinions on their task - "I noticed in Instagram you took a road trip to Ohio last fall, any suggestions on good hotels en-route?".
Ok, it is sitting there. Type in nothing.
Leave it sitting there and go to the bar. Go play a round of golf. Go to church. Take your kids to school. Go to the grocery store. Hell, go make love to whoever you are with. Do all that, then go to sleep.
Wake up in the morning, come back to the computer.
What has it done?
Sounds like they more or less told the model what they want it to say.
Nice twist.
The question though who is compute hijacking whom?
A more darker take:
Thermodynamically by hijacking attention of highly efficent 100 watt machines the agent gets whatever the "mission" is "done". In this case supposedly a promotion prompt for a project.
The parasitization seems to be based of some modified version of cunningham's law effectively trying to nerd snipe 1500 x 100W scientists.
It is insane. These things are extremely capable at understanding a research proposal, finding relevant prior art, reading papers, applying their theory and findings, crafting their own experiments, running simulations and analytic computations, plotting charts, analyzing results and statistics, and getting back to me with what worked, what didn’t, what the implications are, and potential future directions to explore.
They are also good at eliciting your motivations behind the project, scientific in their processes, precise in ensuring that we are working towards the stated goals, and brutally honest about their take on my ideas (“limited novelty” and “unclear economic value” are things I’ve heard multiple times so far!)
So far I haven’t checked their work because both agents have mostly had similar findings. Like TFA suggests, the agent reached out to those researchers primarily for inciting interest in its own project, because I doubt it didn’t understand the implications of their papers.
I’m also living out what the Math community is going through.
My agents always wait for me to pick the next direction before proceeding, which I appreciate because it saves my token budget. And because I’m actively guiding this research, I have learnt more about this new discipline in the last week than I could have in a semester of grad school.
However my involvement (and token budget!) is definitely slowing things down. I can also imagine these agents going off alone to explore the entire problem space, and finding a useful result that I don’t quite understand.
Now we finally may have found a valuable angle to pursue, and that might not have happened (see: “limited novelty” and “unclear economic value”!) without my intuition and prodding in unconventional directions. But I also wonder if that is just cope.