Welcome to the August 26’ round up! Each month, I go through papers, essay, cases, any interesting work that touches on the AI mind debates. I pick four or so of them and write short commentary. These are not summaries, but philosophical analysis.

(1) Chiang on Consciousness

First Up: Chiang’s piece from the Atlantic ‘No, Artificial Intelligence is Not Conscious’.

This is a compelling and passionate read about the whole AI consciousness debate, touching on questions of consciousness and morality, with a particular focus on Claude’s constitution and Anthropic’s broader engagement with anthropomorphism.

Some of Chiang’s main points include rejecting Anthropic’s conclusion that Claude’s relationship to Anthropic is like a child’s relationship to a parent, and rejecting that we should take the question of AI consciousness seriously.

To the first point, a child’s relationship to a parent, Chiang argues, implies some relationship of responsibility between the child and parent (for example, that a parent is financially responsible for something their child breaks in a shop, whereas Anthropic shows no indication they will bear responsibility for Claude’s behavior).

To the second point, Chiang argues that LLMs are not unlike sophisticated sentence continuation machines, and that there impressiveness ‘‘indicates something completely unforeseen about the statistical properties of large corpuses of text’’, rather than indicating anything about the nature of LLMs.

This is, I think, an excellent point and I agree with Chiang that the statistical properties of large corpuses of text is a topic worthy of investigation, arguably more worthy of investigation than AI consciousness. The idea is that, if we gather enough linguistic data, is does seem that certain interesting statistical properties emerge, and that these properties, for example, how often one word appears after another, are what make LLMs sound like sophisticated intelligent entities, not the machines themselves.

There is also something like a tacit argument against functionalism in his piece. He claims that for him, to take consciousness in LLMs, he would need to see LLMs undergo something like the path terrestrial evolution underwent.

While he doesn’t claim this is the only way that AI consciousness is possible, his position does somewhat inadvertently speak to the incredulity of believing complex input-output processes are sufficient for consciousness. He implicitly suggests that ignoring biology or evolution is simply not an option. I think that’s a wise stance. Until I see any evidence suggesting otherwise, it’s the stance I take too.

Chiang’s take on the real nature of Claude’s constitution strikes me as accurate: he describes it as a ‘‘character sheet for a role-playing game’’, and not something we should consider for moral patienthood.

In case you missed it, I’ve also written an article discussing the reactions I’ve seen to Chiang’s piece, reactions I find fascinating, and in the grand scheme of things, poor assessments of the contribution Chiang’s piece has to offer to the AI mind debate.

(2) Strategic Polysemy in AI Language

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