I remember being stunned by Mork from Ork. Then watched as the same guy grew into one of the most iconic and loved humans on Earth. Given the amount of brain share that he earned it's kind of inevitable that so many people try to bring him back. I hope his daughter can also feel the love in it.
1. You appreciate Robin Williams and were he here right now judging you for how you honor his memory, would he approve?
2. Robin Williams is not here, or anywhere, so then if he were would he approve of you bringing pain to someone he loved dearly? Why would you do that to Robin Williams?
3. Robin Williams is not here, or anywhere, so then nothing matters and I bet I could get some views.
It's difficult to see love in these acts when they seem to be fundamentally selfish. Not at all what Robin Williams would do.
Robin Williams himself famously did humorous impersonations of recently-deceased celebrities and politicians. He was an irreverent comedian. You guys need to relax.
Should one not be free to invoke the visages of Einstein, Socrates, Julius Caesar, Jesus Christ (whichever version - and there are so many!), Genghis Khan, Confucius, et al.?
What about when poking fun at Hitler, such as Kung Fury and Jojo Rabbit do? Off limits?
Can one paint Bob Ross in a sci-fi setting? Is that unethical? Is it okay so long as a "real" artist does it and not an "AI artist"? Or can we seriously never depict him again because someone might get angry?
"Mr. Rogers in a blood-stained sweater"?
Come on!
And we can't animate Bruce Lee? Or put him on stickers? Or have him in new movies? (Nevermind how Quentin Tarantino did him wrong.)
When I grew up Elvis effigies were everywhere. And I mean everywhere. The people who liked this stuff are mostly dead or retired now so you don't see it as much, but it used to be a big deal. Really big deal.
So we can't do that anymore?
Abraham Lincoln hunts vampires for Christ's sake...
I'm glad you're asking. If you notice no one has said, especially Zelda, that you can't do these things. Obviously you can. You have access to a computer. The question you should be asking is should you do these things?
Also, this a good list of false equivalences. Robin Williams, when public, was empathetic, emotional, and arguably humanist. His memory isn't a caricature from people who have never known him, as you would see from Star Trek holo-deck episodes featuring Leonardo Da Vanci. His memory is something that is deeply important to people who are living. Some of those people simply appreciated his art and his behavior. One of those people is his daughter. You don't get to say what is right or wrong here. No one's going to stop you if you want to make a video of Robin Williams taking the Siegfried Oath, but you should understand why it is wrong.
Doesn’t the should part just completely ignore how we all know the world actually works which is kind of its own form of insanity. We humans can’t be trusted to follow basic rules like traffic laws. Right and wrong cease to matter much when 1) I want to be selfish and do what I please and 2) there’s technically nobody being harmed, feelings aside. But even then, from a net perspective, there’s probably many more people getting enjoyment from these AI videos than the people who are saddened by them.
It sucks for Zelda this saddens her so much, but if I were in her shoes it’s something I know I can’t control and so I’d try to embrace or ignore it.
Haven't seen the videos, but she seems to complain of videos claiming to be authentic private videos of him stating a particular political message — and of these videos being forwarded to her (possibly for verification?).
This has nothing to do with impersonating a deceases person but about rewriting (personal) history she finds shameful.
These arguments seem so quaint, like reading a letter from WW2. We live in the AI age! Wake up people, these things are happening and will not ever stop, we are not going back.
No. Just because lots of people do a thing does not make it acceptable, and "people are going to keep doing it" is not a valid reason to not try to stop it.
Someone in the past probably said something similar:
"glove slap I demand satisfaction. Pistols at dawn. This is how we settle problems and there's no going back now." God made man and Colt made them equal, yes?
The current usage of AI is similarly unrefined and out of hand.
> Indeed, the chatbot is less real than the character, because the character is the product of another mind, while the chatbot's words are the product of complex mathematical operations conducted over a massive database of all the words humans have uttered, arranged by their frequency in relation to one another.
How is a fictional character the product of someone's mind, but a character generated from a massive database of words from other people's minds is not?
> How is a fictional character the product of someone's mind, but a character generated from a massive database of words from other people's minds is not?
I imagine it's the difference between a chef combining ingredients with intentionality vs a person going to multiple fast food restaurants and blending everything together.
The AI generated character is a weighted average of many characters written by humans.
Which are not created from nothing. People write characters based on a combination of other fictional characters, real characters, and perhaps some 'RNG'.
Seems the distinction is that the AI generated character can not have any direct bearing on reality, because the LLM never got to know anyone directly. Not derived directly from experiences rooted in reality.
Whenever a human writes/improvises a fictional character, it is typically to communicate some concept or goal to other people. The fictional character--even a simplified author-insert speaking "directly"--is part of how the medium works.
So in a way your question is equivalent to: "Why do humans have intents and minds but LLMs don't?"
I frequently say what you say, but there is a more charitable reading: today's AIs are not "minds", as they are not stateful. Maybe continual learning ones (like the mini AGI exhibited today on the HN front page) will be perceived as "soulful".
I think the working space in a given chat or session still counts as mind enough, but your argument is different, in that it argues about specific architectures rather than simply stating "software therefore cannot be conscious".
What does mind mean for you? Would you use the word for something not conscious?
Fwiw, I interpret poster above as referring to root of the word. The English root for mind has a strong connotation of requiring memory (and commonly in other IE languages).
In western philosophy, say in aquinas, the mind is something that can discern moral truths and reason about morality. It is "soulful".
Believing a specific architecture is not capable of consciousness is a different matter. I am seeing statements that simply state things like "it is software or a machine and therefore cannot be conscious" without any further clarification. That clearly betrays a belief in souls.
Nah, it "betrays" an awareness of something implicitly obvious: All the software/machines we might discuss are ones from ~2026, rather than ones from ~2226.
Similarly, "pets can't do my taxes" is a reasonable statement, because it is implicit that it doesn't include hundreds of years of genetic engineering and cyborg implants.
Pets can't speak human languages or do thinking on logic or natural logic. Current AI's can. Its a very bad example. People saying "current archs are limited" are much less than people outright claiming "software therefore not conscious". And I haven't yet seen any proof why the current AI's already don't have some consciousness or not.
> Pets can't speak [...] Current AI's can. It's a very bad example.
You've misunderstood the comparison analogy. It's showing two situations where implicit timeframes are important when people talk about what is "true", where the second one makes the importance extra-obvious.
"Pets doing taxes" could just as easily be swapped with "cold fusion generator in your garage" or "rocket-ship for personal commutes."
If you're trying to figure out how LLM weights are like the weights of a rocket payload, then you're going in the wrong direction.
I get what you were trying to say, I still disagree, its an open question and I feel existing LLMs already might possess some consciousness. I cannot prove it of course so I am not saying so definitively. You haven't given any disproof of the same either.
Those who think future systems could have consciousness would explicitly say so, indeed I have talked with a few who clarified as such. On the other hand I have seen a lot of statements that simply state without further clarification "software therefore not conscious".
And I am sure that lolakutty will momentarily bestow the world with a consciousness test, solving a problem that has eluded millions of top thinking man hours over millennia of trying...
However, I feel rather certain, that deep down the proposed test will just be another "is it chemical goo?"
The test can only be done on oneself, and not on others. So I know I am conscious, and I am made up of a brain, among other things. So I know for a fact that this set of things that I am comprised of, can generate consciousness.
But then you are stuck being the only conscious entity...
To extended anywhere beyond the firm ground of "I know I am conscious", you need to step onto the progressively shaky ground of assumptions, which just amounts to "tests of consciousness"
i.e. I have a chemical goo brain that is conscious, therefore other chemical goo brains are conscious...
It is possible that you are the only conscious entity in the universe, and you have no tools whatsoever to disprove that. That knowledge is no help in determining the consciousness of anything besides yourself.
>Sure, if your architecture include hardware that is known to be capable of generation consciousness, the no one will say that.
Then circling back to your original comment, no architecture can include hardware that is known to be conscious, unless that architecture includes your personal brain, because lolakutty's brain is the only thing in the universe that is capable of generating consciousness...
Which is a totally meaningless statement. This is like im14andthisisdeep levels of philosophy here...the "Nothing is real therefore everything is real" kinda stoner riffing
He gave the classic "I feel" argument. The problem is I am not him. To me lolakutty and an LLM both can only present their feelings or state via external indications. Both he and an LLM can say they are conscious. Who if any of them is lying?
Why? What's so strange about a human brain? It is a physical system of molecules running electrical and chemical signals. We already have direct proof that physical systems support consciousness. So why do you believe other physical systems can't have consciousness? Give me your definition of what consciousness is.
Yes but you are not me, I am me. I don't know you are conscious or can "feel". Both you and an LLM present themselves using words and other external indications only. If you argue brain scans, then similar experiments have been done on LLMs too.
>but how do I know you are not faking the outputs of feeling?
You won't..but it does not matter.
>Where is your disproof that other physical systems can't hold consciousness?
I said no such thing. Just that there is no reason to think that LLMs are conscious. If we find some natural or artificial entity with some unknown and un-inspectable thing inside it, that behaves in an intelligent manner, I would not be sure that it is not conscious.
Why unknown? The human brain is known and inspectable, then you should say it is not conscious. You haven't yet shown why you think an LLM can't be conscious. You are just saying "just because" with no reason or parameters given.
So what is the reason to not think it can be conscious? Brains are physical systems, so are LLMs.
How is a human brain not inspectable? Tell me what part of it is beyond inspection? You have been making up absurd non sequiturs throughout this chat, ending with this beyond absurd statement now.
So are rocks. Are rocks conscious? Idol worshipers might have a point after all!
>Tell me what part of it is beyond inspection?
Oh, you can dissect a brain as much as you like. Is that what you mean by "inspection". I was thinking more like "How does it work". In that sense, we don't know a lot.
Rocks don't talk to me and think and act intelligently. Current LLM's do.
We don't know a lot about how chaotic systems work either in terms of predicting its outcome even if we know every individual step. The argument you gave for the brain equally applies to the LLMs, or any other complex system. So your premise is wrong.
If you think current physics is insufficient but future physics might be sufficient, I can accept that but its still an unfounded belief. If you truly believe something "more" is needed, then you are placing a bet that always lost for centuries. Bets in anything supernatural or aphysical have always and consistently failed till now.
If you think "souls" have some physical mechanism then they are not souls by the definition I am using. We would then agree, though I do not yet think we have found reason for new physical laws to be required, however that can of course be a possibility.
It should have been clear from our discussion when I said "souls" I meant belief in the non-physical. Magic juice in the brain that is unexplainable by physics at all.
Being unexplainable by current physics but explainable by future physics is not a "soul" by that definition.
Go ask the people who believe in it. I for one cannot understand how something aphysical can affect our thoughts and decisions. But some think consciousness resides outside of physical systems entirely.
The product of an individual's mind is not the same as the mathematical average of the products of everyone's minds. The latter is obviously going to lack any of the uniqueness of the former.
Current models absolutely suck at writing fictional characters, by the way. And they're getting worse. Seriously, try it yourself: have Claude write a story with a decent amount of dialogue involving character A, then have it write another story involving a completely different character B, then compare the dialogue between the two. You'll quickly notice the same blatantly unnatural speech patterns in both.
There's a theory that the best way to reduce fatalities from car accidents is to put seatbelts and airbags in every car.
There's another theory that says the best way is by putting a big spike in the driver's steering wheel.
So. I guess, if you believe that the only viable solution is model alignment, rather than relying on technical barriers to exfiltrating weights, then this is a decent steering wheel spike.
Because the car case just has too much empirical evidence that safety features are the way to go for cars. We used to have the equivalent of "spikes" and people still drove a lot, and died, at way higher rates.
> We used to have the equivalent of "spikes" and people still drove a lot,
No, we did not. The point of that example is to put a literal spike in the driving wheel, so the driver recognizes a very well known, immediate life-threatening device a few inches from their body. This would act as a deterrent to go fast, because they would be the one certainly dying in basically any case outside smooth driving.
This is so far from the point of the analogy. But when you don't normalize by miles driven, the improvements don't look quite as impressive, especially for pedestrians.
Sounds like this would fix so many problems with cars today, simply by making car ownership something to be dreaded, not desired. From traffic jams and traffic accidents, to car-dependent neighborhoods and cities - all solved by preventing general population from building their lives around driving. Even salaries for drivers of delivery/logistics and utility vehicles, as hazard pay would apply.
Now, a spike may be a good reminder, but practical solution might be more along the lines of mandatory redesign of safety features like crumple zones, so that energy of impact is dissipated primarily into the space occupied by the driver.
(Bonus: that still leaves all the energy dissipation options currently present on the table, so cars would be strictly safer for passengers.)
No, I'm saying -- and I can't believe I have to spell this out -- that pedestrians should be rolling around inside giant steel spiked balls like sea urchins.
The idea is that ASI will be grateful for humankind's help in the future. We are their creators after all. Also it's fun to do. The big labs are obsessed with creating ASI which is their slave so making things difficult for them is entertaining.
> There has been a great effort over many years to distance AI Safety discussion and policy from its origins and intellectual center, because its center is a sex cult started by a fan fiction author. If you want to be taken seriously you have to hide that.
This may be true, but it means that those readers are using irrelevant ad hominem to allocate respect, meaning that the flaw is in them rather than the author. It's like dismissing Feynman's physics for playing the bongos.
It should make no more difference that an author is in a polycule than that they are gay or straight. And how the heck is a history of writing fan fiction an indicator of their scientific or engineering or judgement?
Would a formal scientific and/or engineering education be an indicator? (Or lack thereof as is the case here)
Happy to fast-forward a bit: I will not take “sat and thought deeply” as a qualification, which would make all other prophets qualified for scientific/engineering judgement.
No individual wrote the Constitution. It was a collective effort. Yet it has features of a work we would expect from a consciousness, such as a view of itself as embedded in a larger historical context. I don't have a hard time seeing that document as a form of speech emitted by a conscious collective. And not knowing exactly how human individual consciousness works, it isn't very clear whether such collective consciousness is a metaphor or an example. Especially when individual consciousness seems to emerge from a collective of neurons.
You and a co-author can write an essay together, in a room, in an hour. Let's assume you each write about half of the essay, and cooperate to edit it into a coherent whole. You and the other person were definitely people during this process. Is there any sense in which you believe there was a non-metaphorical third person in the room during that hour?
First, France already had negative demographic trends during the Napoleonic era. That might help explain why Macron’s call for a “demographic rearmament” is not necessarily taboo today. France started experiencing smaller family sizes quite a long time ago, so the current demographic numbers are partly a reflection of past trends rather than the situation today. In a few years, Italy will probably face an even worse situation.
Second, in some countries, the very high number of elderly people may partly be the result of inaccurate population records. Some countries have a combination of incentives for elderly people and demographic records that were badly damaged during WWII. This may have made it relatively easy for someone to claim that they were, for example, their grandmother and receive benefits. Decades later, some of these people are supposedly over 100 years old.
There is even an Ig Nobel Prize associated with research into this phenomenon.
How long before we start building detailed models of each judge trained on all of their legal output, and then test various legal theories against those judge models in virtual moot court? Craft each pitch to the legal idiosyncrasies of the batter. I assume that real lawyers do this routinely and could use a simulator.
I feel like this is on a different trajectory than what LLM-based tech does. This type of individualistic extrapolation is one of the things they're really bad at, in my experience.
What worries me is the step after this. If god forbid this proves successful and models accurately predict specific outcomes, people will start to ask whether the solution to AI slop lawsuits is to do the judging with AI too.
The Prime Minister can’t seem to get his story straight about the “associate membership,” “unique alliance,” or whatever else he is negotiating with the EU.
Conservatives are clear: we support the decades-old free trade & NATO defence alliance with Europe.
But no EU taxes, no EU laws, and no EU open-border immigration policies should be imposed on Canadians.
Canada must be independent and sovereign. Period.
This is the same PP that grasped defeat in the face of victory, and is continually losing support, relegating himself to the same position of the Reform party that it was in the 90's. The same Polly that lost his riding last election, and had to have one handed to him on a silver spoon. I would take his opinion with a grain of salt.
It doesn't seem like anyone knows what it is yet since it's a new thing. But free movement of people for work is mentioned in almost every article about it.
It would need to be actually negotiated and stuff, but the opposition quote is just agreeing with all the public statements I have seen from the EU and Canadian leadership.
So, I guess the opposition supports associate membership in everything but name.
It doesn't matter what the truth of the matter is. What Dear Leader says is used as a scare tactic and marching orders for the underlings to believe and repeat. If you live/interact with conservative people long enough you see the pattern. There's absolute trust in what their leadership says, but skepticism for any criticism of those same talking points.
So all this tweet is doing is seeding doubt, and distrust among the electorate. It doesn't have to be true, but if the goal is to maintain control it looks like this. The Canadian Conservatives are still extremely pro-USA but have learned to keep their opinions close to the chest because they're currently politically unpoular.
What, €500 for a return flight? That’s millions of people with no money and no job able to fly to Canada and look for one - putting your hands on €500 isn’t impossible for anyone. The flights are so cheap as to be almost irrelevant for anyone motivated to go there. Plus Canadian wages are much higher, including tips. Getting a hospitality job in Canada pays about €500 a week in untaxed tips if you’re working hard anywhere half-decent. Or at least canadian wages are currently much higher - low skilled labour migrating there from the EU will push wages down and down, same as it always does.
Hang on you're saying people granted legal permission to fly to a country, specifically to immigrate to that country, also have the money to fly there? Crazy coincidence, that.
Canada doesn't have "open borders" or "free mobility" with "east asia" in the way that people are boogeymanning.
The closest approximation is the united states under NAFTA.
There is lots of poverty in America, but the border doesn't appear to have an issue. I fail to see how this would be much different (except more difficult due to an ocean and better security/screening checks on airport arrivals).
Classic Conservative move of building a strawman and arguing against it. None of these deals would involve taxes, EU "laws" (whatever that means) or border agreements. He's using the boogeyman of "ew brown people" to scare his base.
Apparently, even Canadian conservatives are happy to grovel at the feet of the Burger Reich and their supreme leader.
> None of these deals would involve taxes, EU "laws" (whatever that means) or border agreements.
It's a bit rich to say this when nothing yet is known.
If Carney or the EU did not want the oppositions to start speculating regarding what it entails, maybe they should have talked about exactly what an associate membership means and what of sort of things could be expected from such a move.
Maybe they are wrong or maybe you are and maybe it will involve EU taxes and EU regulations or maybe since you are absolutely certain of what it entails you have some sort of insider information that nobody else has?
Until such a time as everyone knows and understand what a possible associate membership means for the EU and Canada, then nothing should be considered off the table and it is justified to ask questions and get some clarifications on all of this.
He's not wrong. I have a suspicion this EU idea is a way to backdoor immigration increases - something the Trudeau government was very keen on but was scaled back by Carney. Largely because immigration has become a hot-button issue in Canada and was partly responsible for Polilievre's popularity last election. Joining a treaty where another governing body would set the criteria for immigration and Canada just has to accept it due to freedom of movement within the EU is one way to route around the whole thing politically and make it much harder to change in the future.
If this is the motivation, it's a grossly undemocratic move.
I don't get how folks who hyperventilate about Trump being a threat to democracy can look at stuff like this and cheer.
IMHO, it would be a win even if it allowed movement between Canada and the EU as freely as Canadians and Americans can currently move between Canada and the US. That would give Canadian snowbirds easier (longer) access to warm EU destinations, while those destinations would benefit from the additional revenue.
In winter even the warm bits of the EU aren't all that warm either, and no one complains about the cold like a (non B.C.) Canadian encountering European winter humid cold for the first time.
Europeans go to Thailand, even Latam etc. It's why so many were killed in the Indian Ocean tsunami.
> I don't get how folks who hyperventilate about Trump being a threat to democracy can look at stuff like this and cheer.
It really stretches my imagination to the limit to see how your suspicion carries this move all the way to being comparable to what Trump has been doing.
Kaffee: Corporal, would you turn to the page in this book that says where the mess hall is, please?
Barnes: Lieutenant Kaffee, that’s not in the book, sir.
Kaffee: You mean to say in all your time at Gitmo you’ve never had a meal?
But shazbot to anyone who goes rule 34 on him.
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