ok so this is difficult to explain: the difference between consciousness and whatever LLMs are doing is that computers lack the experience that living beings make. the reason why LLMs will never be reliable, i.e. not make grave mistakes, is because they lack a concept of responsibility, i.e. they are careless because there’s nothing on the line for them. they don’t know what it’s like to make a mistake and be wiped out from existence, trained over billions of years to not make these mistakes. meanwhile, living beings do. and that’s the difference.
I mean, I get what you’re saying, and I even would agree, but LLMs don’t even have concepts at all. They’re fancy prediction algorithms. Like, the keyboard I’m using to type this has a list predicted next words available after I hit space. That’s what an LLM is, just bigger in scale.
They are so far from anything that can have a concept in the first place, that saying they lack a concept of responsibility is like saying an earthworm lacks a concept of flying. You could pick the worm up, throw it, and it still wouldn’t have the concept, and you could feed in the entire written works of humanity without an LLM ever gaining a concept of anything.
They aren’t being at all. They’re not a thinking machine, they’re not ai in any real sense of the term. Not even the most advanced generative models out there come close to the thinking ability of an earthworm.