An LLM is a stateless stochastic function ran over your prompt (plus whatever system prompt) as input.
If you genuinely believe that the LLM is conscious, that means every time the function stops running (i.e. stops producing output tokens), the consciousness ends.
This is far closer to death than to, say, sleep, because prompting again doesn’t “wake” the LLM, it just runs the function again, from the top; as if a digital twin was given a transcript of the previous conversation and asked to take it from here.
(Obviously, “murder” was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and this doesn’t even remotely meet any legal definition of murder. I was mostly poking fun at people who think LLMs are alive, without thinking through the implications. Personally, I think the idea that LLMs are alive/conscious/sentient is very often linked to not understanding that LLMs are not, in fact, a constantly-running ghost in the shell, thinking about and remembering things in the background.)
I follow your logic, but maybe consciousness could be different, maybe it doesnt necessarily need to be contiguous with no time breaks. If an alien captured a human and froze them between interrogations, does that mean that human is not a sentient being anymore? Maybe sentience is more rooted in the richness of an entities interactions with itself in response to its surroundings.
Please explain without sounding crazy.
An LLM is a stateless stochastic function ran over your prompt (plus whatever system prompt) as input.
If you genuinely believe that the LLM is conscious, that means every time the function stops running (i.e. stops producing output tokens), the consciousness ends.
This is far closer to death than to, say, sleep, because prompting again doesn’t “wake” the LLM, it just runs the function again, from the top; as if a digital twin was given a transcript of the previous conversation and asked to take it from here.
(Obviously, “murder” was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and this doesn’t even remotely meet any legal definition of murder. I was mostly poking fun at people who think LLMs are alive, without thinking through the implications. Personally, I think the idea that LLMs are alive/conscious/sentient is very often linked to not understanding that LLMs are not, in fact, a constantly-running ghost in the shell, thinking about and remembering things in the background.)
I follow your logic, but maybe consciousness could be different, maybe it doesnt necessarily need to be contiguous with no time breaks. If an alien captured a human and froze them between interrogations, does that mean that human is not a sentient being anymore? Maybe sentience is more rooted in the richness of an entities interactions with itself in response to its surroundings.
In this absolutely ridiculous context, shouldn’t we continually prompt the model to keep it “alive” lol
Until we run out of water and burn the surface of the earth to a crisp, yeah. Although to be fair, capitalism was going to do that either way.