I’m not talking about a precise definition of consciousness, I’m talking about a consistent one.

Does not matter, any which way you try to spin it, any imprecise or “inconsistent” definition anybody would want to use, literally EVERYBODY with half a brain will agree that humans DO have consciousness and a rock does not. A squid could be arguable. But LLMs are just a mm above rocks, and lightyears below squids on the ladder towards consciousness.

The problem is that I have more than a basic understanding of how an LLM works. I’ve written NNs from scratch and I know that we model perceptrons after neurons.

Yea. The same way Bburago models real cars. They look somewhat similar, if you close one eye and squint the other and don’t know how far each of them are. But apart from looks, they have NOTHING in common and in NO way offer the same functionality. We don’t even know how many different types of neurons are, let alone be close to replicating each of their functions and operations:

https://alleninstitute.org/news/why-is-the-human-brain-so-difficult-to-understand-we-asked-4-neuroscientists/

So no, AI/LLMs are absolutely and categorically nowhere near where we could be lamenting about whether they would be conscious or not. Anyone questioning this is a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect, by having zero clue about how complex brains and neurons are, and how basic, simple and function-lacking current NN technology is in comparison.

Your logic is critically flawed. By your logic you could argue that there is no “logical way to argue a human has consciousness”, because we don’t have a precise enough definition of consciousness. What you wrote is just “I’m 14 and this is deep” territory, not real logic.

In reality, you CAN very easily decide whether AI is conscious or not, even if the exact limit of what you would call “consciousness” can be debated. You wanna know why? Because if you have a basic undersanding of how AI/LLM works, than you know, that in every possible, concievable aspect in regards with consciusness it is basically between your home PC and a plankton. None of which would anybody call conscious, by any definition. Therefore, no matter what vague definition you’d use, current AI/LLM defintiely does NOT have it. Not by a longshot. Maybe in a few decades it could get there. But current models are basically over-hyped thermostat control electronics.

The sad thing is, we’ve already had this figured out before.

15-20 years ago Google was almost perfect. It completely blew my mind how accurate and fast it was. Many times it felt like it was a mind-reader. I didn’t even type in half my question and it was already auto-completing it and showing the results, the first few of which contained a very exact and detailed answer that someone wrote on a forum somewhere or an article that gave me a complete and correct answer. Remember the old ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button which directly took you to the first search result? Yea, it was pretty usable back then, because the first result was usually correct. Pepperidge farm 'members…

And then the enshittification started by pumping the site full of ads. First the ads were pretty distinguishable from the real results and you could just scroll through them. Then they started to disguise the ads more and more like real results, and just showing more of them. And by now I think google is basically ONLY ads. There are NO real results on it. Virtually the only ‘content’ you are shown are what somebody has payed for google to show. Even if what you are looking for is a very well known, public interest fact, if nobody is paying for it, google is not going to show it. E.g. the other day google could not find me the website of a country-wide utility company for electricity by typing their exact name, because I guess they haven’t paid their monthly ads for google.

Luckily there are other alternatives to google, which still have ‘don’t do evil’ in their corporate philosophy. None of them are close to as good as google used to be, especially if you are not searching in english. But still a hell of a lot better than how google is now.