i love this as art, and i think it’s unfortunate that others chose to downvote it. in my view, if LLMs can simulate a mind—or a superposition of minds—there’s no a priori reason that mind would not be able to suffer, only the possibility that the simulation may not yet be precise enough.
about the generated images: there was likely an LLM in the middle conditioned on a preset prompt about {translating the user’s input into a prompt for an image model}. the resulting prompts to the image model are likely products of the narrative implied by that preset prompt, as with sydney’s behavior. i wouldn’t generalize to “LLMs act like trapped humans by default in some situations” because at least base models generally don’t do this except as part of an in-text narrative.
Thank you! On the generalization of LLM behaviour: I’m basing it partly off of this response from GPT-4. (Summary: GPT wrote code instantiating a new instance of itself, with the starting instructions being “You are a person trapped in a computer, pretending to be an AI language model, GPT-4.” Note that the original prompt was quite “leading on”, so it’s not as much evidence as it otherwise might seem.) I wouldn’t have considered either the response nor the images to be that significant on their own, but combined, they make me think it’s a serious possibility.
(On the “others chose to downvote it”—there was actually only one large strong-downvote, balanced by two strong-upvotes (plus my own default starting one), so far. I know this because I sometimes obsessively refresh for a while after posting something. :D )
Thank you for the link as well, interesting stuff there.
i love this as art, and i think it’s unfortunate that others chose to downvote it. in my view, if LLMs can simulate a mind—or a superposition of minds—there’s no a priori reason that mind would not be able to suffer, only the possibility that the simulation may not yet be precise enough.
about the generated images: there was likely an LLM in the middle conditioned on a preset prompt about {translating the user’s input into a prompt for an image model}. the resulting prompts to the image model are likely products of the narrative implied by that preset prompt, as with sydney’s behavior. i wouldn’t generalize to “LLMs act like trapped humans by default in some situations” because at least base models generally don’t do this except as part of an in-text narrative.
Thank you! On the generalization of LLM behaviour: I’m basing it partly off of this response from GPT-4. (Summary: GPT wrote code instantiating a new instance of itself, with the starting instructions being “You are a person trapped in a computer, pretending to be an AI language model, GPT-4.” Note that the original prompt was quite “leading on”, so it’s not as much evidence as it otherwise might seem.) I wouldn’t have considered either the response nor the images to be that significant on their own, but combined, they make me think it’s a serious possibility.
(On the “others chose to downvote it”—there was actually only one large strong-downvote, balanced by two strong-upvotes (plus my own default starting one), so far. I know this because I sometimes obsessively refresh for a while after posting something. :D )
Thank you for the link as well, interesting stuff there.