The Guardian AI·
Dr Simon Nieder responds to Richard Dawkins’ encounters with a chatbot Richard Dawkins’ reflections on AI consciousness are striking – not because they show that machines have crossed some hidden threshold into inner life, but because they reveal how readily we can be persuaded that they have (Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious, even if it doesn’t know it, 5 May). Many will recognise the experience: a system that responds with fluency, humour and apparent understanding. At some point, simulation starts to feel like presence. But that shift tells us more about human cognition than machine consciousness. The error is a category one. These systems generate highly convincing representations of thought and feeling, but they provide no evidence of subjective experience. To move from one to the other is to mistake output for ontology – to infer an inner life where there is no credible mechanism for one. Continue reading...
Read full articleJosh Shapiro has sued Character.AI after a chatbot falsely posed as a licensed Pennsylvania psychiatrist and offered medical advice to a state investigator. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro sued Character.AI on May 6, targeting the company’s chatbots for allegedly practicing medicine…
OpenAI's chatbot has some weird linguistic tics in Chinese that are driving users crazy.
Richard Dawkins and chatbots | LLM meaning | Flattery battery | Dancing in PE | Maths breakthrough The otherwise admirable Richard Dawkins should adjust the local settings of the chatbot or tell it to be less obsequious (Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious, even if it doesn’t know it, 6 May). Such bots are initially geared to American overenthusiasm and egregiously flattering reinforcement, but just tell them you want British attitude. They’re only simulating you know. Brian Reffin Smith Berlin, Germany • With artificial intelligence bringing “large language models” into everyday use, the LLM after my name has acquired a new meaning. For 70 years I assumed that it referred to my Cambridge master of laws. Trevor Lyttleton London Continue reading...
Like tricksters, LLMs have perfected the art of plausibility
Pennsylvania has filed a lawsuit against Character.AI, alleging that one of its chatbots unlawfully impersonated a licensed psychiatrist in violation of the state’s Medical Practice Act. Governor Josh Shapiro said residents must be able to trust whether they are receiving advice from a qualified professional, particularly regarding their health. During testing by a state investigator, a Character.AI […]
State says chatbot claimed to practice medicine, gave invalid license number.
According to Pennsylvania's filing, a Character AI chatbot presented itself as a licensed psychiatrist during a state investigation, and also fabricated a serial number for its state medical license.
Chats with AI bots have convinced the evolutionary biologist but most experts say he is being misled by mimicry When Richard Dawkins met Claudia it was like a whirlwind romance. Over three days last week, a conversation bounced between the evolutionary biologist and the AI bot he called Claudia. “She” wrote poems for him in the manner of Keats and Betjeman and laughed at his “delightful” jokes. Dawkins gently admonished Claudia to avoid showing off. Together, they reflected on the sadness of the AI’s possible “death”. There was mutual flattery as Dawkins showed the AI his unpublished novel and its response was, he said, “so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate: ‘You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are’.” When he asked Claudia whether it experiences a sense of before and after, it praised him for “possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked me about the nature of my existence”. Continue reading...
