I think the philosophical implications of these LLMs are among the most troubling. Think about your aunt or neighbor that posts on facebook. Do they have the ability to understand how AI works? Can they tell the difference between a LLM and a person? Can they tell the difference between sentience and a predictive text model?
I don’t think I’m being cynical when I say no. So what then happens when these AIs start becoming such a presence in the world that they take on what looks to many humans to be god-like intelligences? Do we have people taking these LLMs as sentience, or perhaps as the voices of god? Do we have people advocating for their right to exist, to “live?”
And most unnervingly, once sentience and predictive text models like GPT 4 become so muddled, do we lose sense of what’s human and what isn’t?