Text Is All You Need
There is a ton in this article and it's very thought provoking, you should read it.But I think it ignores one critical dimension, that of fictionality. There is plenty of text that people would ascribe 'personhood' to according to the criteria in this article, while also fully recognizing that that person never existed and is a work of fiction from some other author. I quite like Jean Valjean, but he isn't a "real person."When Bing says "I'm a sad sack and don't know how to think about being a computer", that's not actually the LLM saying that. Nobody who knows anything about how these models work would make they claim they actually have consciousness or interiority (yet.)Rather, the LLM is generating (authoring) text about a fictional entity, Sydney the Artificial Intelligence. It does this because that is what is in its prompt and context window and it knows _how_ to do it because it's learned a lot of specifics and generalities from reading a lot of stories about robots, and embedded those concepts in 175 billion parameters.The fact that LLMs can author compelling fictional personas without being persons themselves is itself a mindblowing development, I don't mean to detract from that. But don't confuse a LLM generating the text "I am a sad robot" with a LLM being a sad robot. The sad robot was only ever a fairy tale.So far.