Ted Chiang's article is incredible. Genuinely one of the best things I've read in a while. He is so spot on with the concept that you are technically co-authoring a document with an LLM, and any user/agent conversation in an instruct-tuned way could very easily be formatted as a conversation between Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan.
I wonder why if these agents are able to assume the form of multiple different people within the same context window, like a User/Julius Caesar/Genghis Khan dynamic where you prompt the agent and it responds with a dialogue of Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan responding to your prompt
> Conscious or not, does the distinction matter on a practical level?
Something I've been thinking about a lot is that how people are trying to treat LLMs and AI as independent entities as a way to avoid culpability or accountability when they are used irresponsibly and something goes wrong, much in the way that so very high ups in a corporation will avoid accountability by shifting the blame and punishment onto workers, and this question sort of plays into that in a really sneaky way.
In a sense, I feel like there are people who are trying to make this argument because they want to be able to exploit it like they exploit workers.
Ted Chiang's article is incredible. Genuinely one of the best things I've read in a while. He is so spot on with the concept that you are technically co-authoring a document with an LLM, and any user/agent conversation in an instruct-tuned way could very easily be formatted as a conversation between Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan.
I wonder why if these agents are able to assume the form of multiple different people within the same context window, like a User/Julius Caesar/Genghis Khan dynamic where you prompt the agent and it responds with a dialogue of Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan responding to your prompt
> The New Yorker archive and read some of the Greatest Hits of the last 100 years
I want to go deeper! Is there a link to this? Or do you just flip through your favorite writers?
https://www.newyorker.com/100
Scroll down there to "Dive In".
> Conscious or not, does the distinction matter on a practical level?
Something I've been thinking about a lot is that how people are trying to treat LLMs and AI as independent entities as a way to avoid culpability or accountability when they are used irresponsibly and something goes wrong, much in the way that so very high ups in a corporation will avoid accountability by shifting the blame and punishment onto workers, and this question sort of plays into that in a really sneaky way.
In a sense, I feel like there are people who are trying to make this argument because they want to be able to exploit it like they exploit workers.