this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2026
359 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
88784 readers
2965 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If someone truly believes LLMs are sentient, then they must under no circumstances prompt them even once; that would be murder.
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.
That doesn't really change anything. Every function invocation is still completely separate. Doesn't matter if it's a single conversation where you always answer, or parallel conversations.
Absolutely not! It changes everything, and explicitly because said so! Since we are making shit up to begin with lol 🤣
We walked away from "reason" the moment we entered a conversation about "murdering" an LLM... LOL
What? I explicitly do not believe you can "murder" an LLM, I'm saying that due to the way the technology actually works, that if someone genuinely believes an LLM is sentient or alive, then sending a message to it mist also mean it "dies" afterwards.
LLMs are obviously neither sentient nor alive (and therefore the concept of murder doesn't even remotely apply).
You know those news articles about how like a third of adults are functionally illiterate?
I feel like I've been seeing more people replying to the shape of a comment, rather than what's actually being said, like right now.