Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
hn_acc1 | on: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
If you feed the same prompt to the same AI with the same random seed, you'll get the same answer every time.

If a hundred people see the same event, will they all respond the same?

Jtarii | parent | next
If I ask my friend what his favourite song is 100 times I will get the same answer back 100 times. Is my friend therefore not conscious?
Jensson | root | parent | next
> If I ask my friend what his favourite song is 100 times I will get the same answer back 100 times.

Pretty sure you wont, humans vary the exact wording. They will say the same song but they wont answer the exact same way every time. Even if they say the same words two times they wont use the same tone and body language, as they don't just communicate via words and that nonverbal language is a part of what we say.

jcattle | root | parent
If you ask him 100 times in a row I would bet that by the second, maybe third, time he will not answer with his song but with: what the fuck is wrong with you?

Nicely circling back to LLMs not being able to learn and form memories.

grumbel | parent | next
> If a hundred people see the same event, will they all respond the same?

If you have hundred different people, they will of course do something different. Just like hundred different AI model will do something different. The question you have to ask is if the same person under the same circumstances would do the same.

Luckily, we have an answer to that: They would. Transient Global Amnesia is a condition where people temporarily lose the ability to form memories and in turn they keep repeating the same conversation again and again[1]. Their brain keeps asking the same question again and again, as it doesn't remember the answers it already got.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3fA5uzWDU8

keeda | parent
Have they had the exact same experiences and influences all the way to that point in time?