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An Alarming Number of Gen Z Ai Users Think It's Conscious

⁨282⁩ ⁨likes⁩

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.pcmag.com/news/an-alarming-number-of-gen-z-ai-users-think-its-conscious

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  • salacious_coaster@infosec.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The LLM peddlers seem to be going for that exact result. That’s why they’re calling it “AI”. Why is this surprising that non-technical people are falling for it?

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    • CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      That’s why they’re calling it “AI”.

      That’s not why. They’re calling it AI because it is AI. AI doesn’t mean sapient or conscious.

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      • thehatfox@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        In the general population it does. Most people are not using an academic definition of AI, they are using a definition formed from popular science fiction.

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      • laz@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        The I implies intelligence; of which there is none because it’s not sentient. It’s intentionally deceptive because it’s used as a marketing buzzword.

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      • dissipatersshik@ttrpg.network ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I’m not gonna lie, most people like you are afraid to entertain the idea of AI being conscious because it makes you look at your own consciousness as not being all that special or unique.

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      • Moobythegoldensock@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        What is this nonsense Euler diagram? Emotion can intersect with consciousness, but emotion is also a subset of consciousness but emotion also never contains emotion? Intelligence does overlap at all with sentience, sapience, or emotion? Intelligence isn’t related at all to thought, knowledge, or judgement?

        Did AI generate this?

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  • shaggyb@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I think an alarming number of Gen Z internet folks find it funny to skew the results of anonymous surveys.

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    • cornshark@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yeah, what is it with GenZ? Millenials would never skew the results of anonymous surveys

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      • Hobo@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Right? Just insane to think that Millenials would do that. Now let me read through this list of Time Magazines top 100 most influential people of 2009.

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  • Death_Equity@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    They also are the dumbest generation with a COVID education handicap and the least technological literacy in terms of mechanics comprehension. They have grown up with technology that is refined enough to not need to learn troubleshooting skills past “reboot it”.

    How they don’t understand that a LLM can’t be conscious is not surprising. LLMs are a neat trick, but far from anything close to consciousness or intelligence.

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    • LorIps@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Have fun with your back problems!

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      • Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        It will happen to YOU! Image

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    • Muaddib@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      How they don’t understand that a LLM can’t be conscious is not surprising

      It’s because they’re all atheists! They don’t know that souls are granted to humans by the gods.

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  • 58008@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    This is an angle I’ve never considered before, with regards to a future dystopia with a corrupt AI running the show. AI might never advance beyond what it is in 2025, but because people believe it’s a supergodbrain, we start putting way too much faith in its flawed output, and it’s our own credulity that dismantles civilisation rather than a runaway LLM with designs of its own. Misinformation unwittingly codified and sanctified by ourselves via ChatGeppetto.

    The call is coming from inside the house mechanical Turk!

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    • TheKMAP@lemmynsfw.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      They call it hallucinations like it’s a cute brain fart, and “Agentic” means they’re using the output of one to be the input of another, which has access to things and can make decisions and actually fuck things up. It’s a complete fucking shit show. But humans are expensive so replacing them makes line go up.

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    • dissipatersshik@ttrpg.network ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I mean, it’s like none of you people ever consider how often humans are wrong when criticizing AI.

      How often have you looked for information from humans and have been fed falsehoods as though they were true? It happens so much we’ve just gotten used to filtering out the vast majority of human responses because most of them are incorrect or unrelated to the subject.

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    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      That’s the intended effect. People with real power think this way: “where it does work, it’ll work and not bother us with too much initiative and change, and where it doesn’t work, we know exactly what to do, so everything is covered”. Checks and balances and feedbacks and overrides and fallbacks be damned.

      Humans are apes. When an ape gets to rule an empire, it remains an ape and the power kills its ability to judge.

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  • Evotech@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Same generation who takes astrology seriously, I’m shocked

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    • CoolMatt@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Taking astrology seripusly isn’t a gen z thing, where hve you been?

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  • Blinsane@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It’s likely they don’t know what the word “conscious” means

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    • General_Effort@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      In fairness, the word “conscious” has a range of meanings. For some, it is synonymous with certain religious ideas. They would be alarmed by the “heresy”. For others, it is synonymous to claiming that some entity is entitled to the same fundamental rights as a human being. Those would be quite alarmed by the social implications. Few people use the term in a strictly empiricist sense.

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    • Faceman2K23@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Their consciousness is arguable to begin with

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      • Goldholz@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        “Hohohoho these young people are so dumb” Repeating exactly what we all collectively hate about boomers and x

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      • Muaddib@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Everyone’s is, fellow p-zombie

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  • RowRowRowYourBot@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Lots of people lack critical thinking skills

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  • taladar@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I wasn’t aware the generation of CEOs and politicians was called “Gen Z”.

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    • ChickenAndRice@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      We have to make the biggest return on our investments, fr fr

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    • Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      The article targets its study on Gen Z but… yeah, the elderly aren’t exactly winners here, either.

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  • WalnutLum@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I wish philosophy was taught a bit more seriously.

    An exploration on the philosophical concepts of simulacra and eidolons would probably change the way a lot of people view LLMs and other generative AI.

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  • coffeeismydrug@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    to be honest they probably wish it was conscious because it has more of a conscience than conservatives and capitalists

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  • shiroininja@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I’ve been hearing a lot about gen z using them for therapists, and I find that really sad and alarming.

    AI is the ultimate societal yes man. It just parrots back stuff from our digital bubble because it’s trained on that bubble.

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    • cornshark@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Chatgpt disagrees that it’s a yes-man:

      To a certain extent, AI is like a societal “yes man.” It reflects and amplifies patterns it’s seen in its training data, which largely comes from the internet—a giant digital mirror of human beliefs, biases, conversations, and cultures. So if a bubble dominates online, AI tends to learn from that bubble.

      But it’s not just parroting. Good AI models can analyze, synthesize, and even challenge or contrast ideas, depending on how they’re used and how they’re prompted. The danger is when people treat AI like an oracle, without realizing it’s built on feedback loops of existing human knowledge—flawed, biased, or brilliant as that may be.

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  • dissipatersshik@ttrpg.network ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Why are we so quick to assume machines cannot achieve consciousness?

    Unless you can point to me the existence of a spirit or soul, there’s nothing that makes our consciousness unique from what computers are capable of accomplishing.

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    • barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I don’t doubt the possibility but current AI tech, no.

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      • shiroininja@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        It’s barely even AI. The amount of faith people have in these glorified search engines and image generators Lmao

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    • phoenixz@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      This is not claiming machines cannot be conscious ever. This is claiming machines aren’t conscious right now.

      LLMs are like databases with a huge list of distances allowing you to find the “shortest” (aka most likely) distance to the next word. It’s literally little more than that.

      One day true AI might exist. One day perhaps… But not today.

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  • futatorius@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    An alarming number of them believe that they are conscious too, when they show no signs of it.

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  • rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    An Alarming Number of Anyone Believes Fortune Cookies

    Just … accept it, superstition is in human nature. When you take religion away from them, they need something, it’ll either be racism/fascism, or expanding conscience via drugs, or belief in UFOs, or communism at least, but they need something.

    The last good one was the digital revolution, globalization, world wide web, all that, no more wars (except for some brown terrorists, but the rest is fine), everyone is free and civilized now (except for those with P*tin as president and other such types, but it’s just an imperfect democracy don’t you worry), SG-1 series.

    Anything changing our lives should have an intentionally designed religious component, or humans will improvise that where they shouldn’t.

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  • tal@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    At some point in the mid-late 1990s, I recall having a (technically-inclined) friend who dialed up to a BBS and spent a considerable amount of time pinging and then chatting with Lisa, the “sysadmin’s sister”. When I heard about it, I spent quite some time arguing with him that Lisa was a bot.

    bbs.hmvh.net/hmvh/lisa/LISA.HTM

    textfiles.com/bbs/install.txt

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    • dissipatersshik@ttrpg.network ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Honestly, I welcome this future.

      I’d rather discuss with bots at this point than rubes.

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  • aesthelete@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I tried to explain a directory tree to one of them (a supposedly technical resource) for twenty minutes and failed. They’re idiots.

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    • dissipatersshik@ttrpg.network ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I’m assuming part of it is because you’re a bad teacher as well.

      Just going off of my life experience, I notice the vast majority of people are bad at teaching and then blame the pupil for their incompetence.

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      • aesthelete@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I’m not a teacher.

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    • Muaddib@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Anyone can understand a directory tree. Not everyone is smart enough to explain it.

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      • aesthelete@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        They were designing functionality that contained directory trees and didn’t understand directory trees. How is it my problem that this person is not qualified to do their own job?

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  • lupusblackfur@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Keep up the politeness. It’s costing Altman real money… 😂

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    • Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      The batshit insane part of that is they could just make canned answers for thank yous, but nope…IT’S THE USER’S FAULT!

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      • lupusblackfur@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        One would think if they’re as fucking smartas they believe they are they could figger a way around it, eh??? 🤣

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  • paris@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I checked the source and I can’t find their full report or even their methodology.

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  • uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    An alarming number of Hollywood screenwriters believe consciousness (sapience, self awareness, etc.) is a measurable thing or a switch we can flip.

    At best consciousness is a sorites paradox. At worst, it doesn’t exist and while meat brains can engage in sophisticated cognitive processes, we’re still indistinguishable from p-zombies.

    I think the latter is more likely, and will reveal itself when AGI (or genetically engineered smat animals) can chat and assemble flat furniture as well as humans can.

    (On mobile. Will add definition links later.)

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    • Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I’d rather not break down a human being to the same level of social benefit as an appliance.

      Perception is one thing, but the idea that these things can manipulate and misguide people who are fully invested in whatever process they have, irks me.

      I’ve been on nihilism hill. It sucks. I think people, and living things garner more genuine stimulation.

      Oh, people can be bad, too. There’s no doubting that, but people have identifiable motives. What does an Ai “want?”

      whatever it’s told to.

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      • uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        You’re not alone in your sentiment. The whole thought experiment of p-zombies and the notion of qualia comes from a desire to assume human beings should be given a special position, but in that case, a sentient is who we decide it is, the way Sophia the Robot is a citizen of Saudi Arabia (even though she’s simpler than GPT-2 (unless they’ve upgraded her and I missed the news.)

        But it will raise a question when we do come across a non-human intelligence. It was a question raised in both the Blade Runner movies, what happens when we create synthetic intelligence that is as bright as human, or even brighter? If we’re still capitalist, assuredly the companies that made them will not be eager to let them have rights.

        Obviously machines and life forms as sophisticated as we are are not merely the sum of our parts, but the same can be said about most other macro-sized life on this planet, and we’re glad to assert they are not sentient the way we are.

        What aggravates me is not that we’re just thinking meat but with all our brilliance we’re approaching multiple imminent great filters and seem not to be able to muster the collective will to try and navigate them. Even when we recognize that our behavior is going to end us, we don’t organize to change it.

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      • Krompus@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Humans also want what they’re told to, or we wouldn’t have advertising.

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  • Treczoks@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    If they mistake those electronic parrots for conscious intelligencies, they probably won’t be the best judges for rating such things.

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  • Muaddib@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Why are you booing them? They’re right.

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  • ERROR_100_000_100@infosec.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The machines in Detroit: Become Human are not alive, its a corporate botnet.

    The “Androids win” ending is a bad ending. They will will vote in favor of corporate interests, since they are secretly controlled by the elites.

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    • dissipatersshik@ttrpg.network ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Looks like the androids won in real life.

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  • Xanza@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Those lovable little simpletons.

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    • BreadstickNinja@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Are we positive that they’re conscious? I just think we should run some tests.

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      • General_Effort@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Good question. Over the years, I’ve read a number of arguments about consciousness, or more precisely against machine consciousness. One thing that’s striking is that the authors never apply the same logic to themselves or humans in general. It’s like they completely lack self-awareness. If I took the whole “p-zombie” idea seriously, I’d look for such p-zombies. And these philosophers would be my first candidates.

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    • dissipatersshik@ttrpg.network ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Irony.

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  • HubertManne@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Its a friend the way the nice waitress is a friend when you go eat out.

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  • J52@lemmy.nz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Whatever, couldn’t it also be that a technical consciousness will look rather different from what we assume? There are obviously less/none of some factors, ie emotional intelligence etc. But a tech super intelligence, if ever reached, may have a number of unexpected problems for us. We should concentrate on unexpected outcomes and establish safeguards.

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  • General_Effort@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Not sure what’s alarming about that. It’s a bit early to worry about an AI Dred Scott, no?

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    • Bronzebeard@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      It’s alarming people are so gullible that a glorified autocorrect can fool them into thinking it’s sapient

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      • Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        “how dare you insult my robot waifu?!”

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      • orclev@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Is it still passing the Turing test if you don’t think either one is human?

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  • RedditIsDeddit@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    An alarming number of people can’t read over a 6th grade level.

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