this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2026
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Maybe this is part of the campaign trying to convince people that their chatbot has developed a consciousness. Recently they even tried to convince the pope that Claude is a conscious being: https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/anthropic-tried-persuade-pope-ai-131853948.html
They are less arguing for people to think the model is conscious, and more to avoid people prematurely claiming certainty it is not (like the Pope did). From their view, the research keeps leading to surprising (to them) results at odds with high confidence disclaiming of potential consciousness (according to several of the many, many differing definitions of that term).
Give me a break, we all know the AI cultists at these companies think their chatbot is conscious. What you stated is just their shallow attempt at manipulating people into gradually accepting their position.
If the LLM is conscious then terminating a session is murder.
Is killing a pig murder?
What about putting someone under general anesthesia?
(It was a nice try at a reductio ad absurrum fallacy, but those tend to kind of suck, just fyi.)
Also, personally I'd say that given the general poor standing of consciousness research in humans across both neurological and philosophical domains, the much more important and relevant question than whether models are conscious (a fool's errand to debate) is whether or not they are simulating consciousness. Lots of reasons engaging with the "as if" conscious makes sense for the latter even if the former is false.
Some people would argue it is. I can't really do that while holding a bratwurst. But if we think the LLM is intelligent and conscious, then that's another step.
is reversible so completely irrelevant.
Absurdum
Condescension doesn't make you any friends, just FYI
So is a session transcript.
My understanding is that the context if the session is bigger than just the outputs. If it is, then shutting it down is "murder". If it isn't, then it is as conscious as a notebook.
There is (it's the kv cache), but it's recomputable from the session transcript.
Part of why comparing human consciousness and possible AI equivalents is not easily apples to apples.
I can't take a human and create a backup state to restore to, or fork into multiple versions of the same mind that then goes down different paths, or pause and then resume things.
Humans do have consciousness continuity breaks and it's quite possible we only have an illusion of continuity vs actual continuity at a neurological level. So just as a transformer has seams at generating the individual token as well as at a context window, humans have consciousness seams (sleep, anesthesia, highway hypnosis, short term memory capacity, etc). But there are very wide differences between human consciousness as an effectively constrained singleton and AI as able to be quite multiple and resumable from an initial single state.
Wrong group to start with. The church doesn't see you as a person if you are different, they will never say that a machine can have a "soul". Not that LLMs are anywhere near conscious, I just like bashing on the chief pedo.
Fuck the Church and their pedophile rulers, but I don't think the Pope took the bait on this one.
Pope Leo has a bachelors of science in mathematics, they'll never be able to convince him that matrix multiplication is alive.
That citation has nothing to do with mathematical knowledge. It's assertion of attributes that religious people deem relevant for personhood before god. It admits AI capabilities insofar as they're undeniable, but then focuses on assertions what this does not mean.
Coming from a religious household nothing about this is a surprise. It's very well articulated, but it still does not carry any special insights. It's a completely predictable position for a religious leader.
Some more Cool Aid, Mr Ballooon?