Discord et al should not be permitted to ask for proof of age. If you don't already need my credit card, you lack any legitimate reason to handle personal information. And even retailers don't need to see me.
Fuck no. It is only because of the Turing test that we can say they're not conscious. You get someone questioning a bot and a person at the same time, they're gonna figure out who's who in short order. See: how many Rs in strawberry, name states without an E, should I walk to the car wash.
If a program was indistinguishable from a person, what basis would we have to say the person is intelligent but the program is not?
... and this wasn't made by accident, it was deliberately engineered to develop emergent behavior. Quite a lot of money has been spent hiring a variety of experts to make it do this thing.
Hasn't worked. Almost certainly will never work, with this particular kind of network. But we would not have known that, just by looking at diagrams and going 'naaahhh.'
Careful down that road. Thought is a process, and we don't understand it well enough to explain it. So we cannot confidently declare it couldn't happen by tumbling text through layers of fake neurons.
LLMs definitely aren't conscious, because they're dumb as hell. But we had to check. When GPT-2 was novel and closely guarded, we had no idea how well backpropagation could abstract all text ever published - and pessimists were mostly pushing Chinese Room nonsense. We have to bully that denialist thought experiment off the internet. It starts from a demonstrably intelligent subject - as real to you as I am now - then interrogates some unrelated interchangeable hardware. As if the conversations with your short-range pen-pal were not real unless the guy in the box knows why he's blindly following instructions. It's p-zombie dualism, except instead of a soul, you need Steve to pay attention.
Only an explanation in terms of unconscious events could explain consciousness.
If you ask for a long-ass list of anything, LLMs have context-length problems. Like trying to repeat the word elephant over and over. The math doesn't like it and weird shit happens.
If you ask for one name at a time, and it comes up with the same name a bunch... uh... yeah? Were you expecting a perfectly flat distribution from McLovin to Mohammad? The probabilistic word-guesser is gonna have some trends. Marcus is an odd first pick, compared to its prevalence, but if you ask for a less-than-typical name, that is a correct answer.
Similarly, if you ask an image model for a generic portrait, you're gonna get something from the middle of the probability space. It might be roughly the same vaguely familiar caucasian brunette every time. Or like this silly experiment, once every five times. It's not gonna be like hitting the Randomize button on Oblivion's character creator, because that's not how this tech works.
This is a crime and you are the victim.