it’s plausible to me that almost any public discussion of AI or AI safety that is not centrally about LLM consciousness should clarify this early and often.
Low-context audiences are really hung up on the consciousness topic, and are often reading entirely unrelated material as though it were trying to make a claim about consciousness, then generalizing to a judgement about the speaker that inoculates them against partitioning consciousness and capabilities.
Clarifying that you don’t mean to step in the consciousness discussion upfront may be a way to reduce instances of this (but could also backfire? I’m actually not confident in the solution; maybe the real thing is ‘if you’re discussing AI on the internet expect that someone with no context will show up and read it in this way, and do whatever makes sense to do to head that off’, but that seems much more costly and delicate a procedure than a simple disclaimer).
[inspired by recent twitter activity related to the Anthropic PSM paper]
it’s plausible to me that almost any public discussion of AI or AI safety that is not centrally about LLM consciousness should clarify this early and often.
Low-context audiences are really hung up on the consciousness topic, and are often reading entirely unrelated material as though it were trying to make a claim about consciousness, then generalizing to a judgement about the speaker that inoculates them against partitioning consciousness and capabilities.
Clarifying that you don’t mean to step in the consciousness discussion upfront may be a way to reduce instances of this (but could also backfire? I’m actually not confident in the solution; maybe the real thing is ‘if you’re discussing AI on the internet expect that someone with no context will show up and read it in this way, and do whatever makes sense to do to head that off’, but that seems much more costly and delicate a procedure than a simple disclaimer).
[inspired by recent twitter activity related to the Anthropic PSM paper]