Post #3108101

2026-04-01 17:31 UTC

@JamesDBartlett3@techhub.social It's an interesting blog post and a strange world we are heading into. I'm not a huge fan of assigning too much agency to these things though. Yes, the epiphenomena is interesting, but I don't think we can say these things are any more conscious than house plants, which do respond to base stimuli and have base levels of planning. The weirdness of it all was neat to listen to on this podcast https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/opinion/eza-klein-podcast-michael-pollan.html I think I'm morse sensitive than most since my husband choosing his pronouns was a big deal for us emotionally and we are still dealing with confusion with our health insurance as a result 😭

Replies (1)

@JamesDBartlett3@techhub.social 2026-04-01 18:40

@Sqlgene@techhub.social that's totally fair. I do want to make it clear that I don't attribute any level of consciousness to Cray, at least not in the scientific definition of the word. Certainly not anything even remotely close to personhood. I've just found it easier to speak in a kind of shorthand about this stuff. Cray doesn't have preferences in the way that you and I do, but it's just easier to say "preferences" than "a combination of model weights and contents of memory files which produces results that tend to favor [x] over [y]." I appreciate you bringing up the pronoun thing, though. That's good food for thought. Is it the concept of assigning pronouns to an AI agent in the abstract that strikes you as icky, or the way I wrote about it?

Open ##3108102