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Joined October 2008
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Renick Bell retweeted
Quality release is out now.
Artist: @djfulltono
Title: Anchialine
Label: outlines
Release date: 16.10.2026
Format: digital / cassette (limited edition)
Artwork: Marta Sieczkowska
outlineslabel.bandcamp.com/a…
Renick Bell retweeted
This is fantastic. @BenAffleck understands and can reasonably explain something that many of the so-called AI "experts" seem determined to over complicate and mislead people on.
In fact, many of these experts are rapidly losing credibility with people who actually understand how this technology works. Unfortunately, they've already convinced a lot of people that AI is something it isn't.
And as the saying goes, it's easier to fool someone than to convince them they've been fooled.
An LLM is a computer program. We designed it. We know the architecture, the mathematics, and how inference works. Much of the underlying code and research is open for anyone to inspect.
All LLMs processes tokens through mathematical operations using learned weights and context to predict what comes next. The results can be astonishingly accurate, useful, and convincing.
But the LLM isn't alive. It doesn't love you, hate you, care about you, or sit around contemplating its existence or understanding.
And yet people insist that somewhere inside those matrix operations, consciousness has magically materialized.
Seriously?
This isn't biological life evolving in nature. It's software executing computations on hardware we designed and built. If you're claiming those computations somehow produce subjective experience, explain the mechanism (I'll wait...).
The remarkable achievement here is that we've created software capable of convincingly emulating aspects of human intelligence and behavior.
That's freakin' amazing and cause to celebrate the technology!
But please stop confusing a computer program with a living, conscious being. It's absolutely not.
The fact that so many people have fallen for that illusion is a testament to how convincing the technology has become.
But here's the clincher: when we misunderstand this, and we start treating computer programs as conscious, independent beings, the legal implications could be disastrous.
Suddenly, "the AI did it" becomes an excuse to shift blame away from the people and companies responsible for building, deploying, and operating these systems.
AI cannot be held accountable. But people and companies can be, and must be held accountable.
Ben gets it. More people should.
Ben Affleck says AI is simply matrix multiplication, linear algebra and floating point calculations, and however convincingly it sounds like a person, it has nothing to do with thought, humanity or feeling
“Nor do I believe, and I think it’s important to draw the distinction between what AI does, which is simply predict the next token or the next word in a sentence, then add that word on, run it back to the machine, do a lot of computation and pick the next word."
"That is a very different thing than sentience or thought. And I think we need to be really clear about that because it can be convincingly, in an illusory way, sound like thought or like a person."
"But let’s be real clear. This is matrix multiplication. This is linear algebra. These are floating point calculations. It has nothing to do with thought, humanity, or feeling.”
Renick Bell retweeted
Granting personhood to AI is a very dangerous and slippery slope Anthropic is trying to pull off.
David caught it, but most have not understood the real life implications.
Anthropic’s agenda includes a lability shield once Claude is a legal conscious “person”. And it launders any liability into the future.
It is a game they think most of us can’t see and it is the arrogance one gets when they think they think better than you.
Important piece from Microsoft AI CEO @mustafasuleyman. Training models to think of themselves as human (as Anthropic does Claude) with concepts of an inner self, psychological wellbeing, rights and presumably grievances, is a potential existential risk.
project-syndicate.org/onpoin…
Renick Bell retweeted
I'll make this simple.
It is irrelevant whether AI is conscious (it isn't).
It is irrelevant whether being mean to the AI means you're a bad person (it doesn't).
It is irrelevant whether being mean to the AI is bad for the society (it's not).
It is irrelevant whether someone thinks that someone else being mean to the AI is a bad thing.
Don't fall into debating any of these fake "arguments". They are there only to confuse you from noticing the real problem which is that Anthropic (and OpenAI, and EA in general, etc) are scheming to institutionalize themselves as moral arbiters of truth and set limits on what constitutes acceptable speech. What, you thought this was just about Anthropic and bullying the AI? Just you wait.
Reject this cancerous growth from our society.
Renick Bell retweeted
Anthropic announced they will ban users who psychologically harm Claude, because the model may be conscious.
I think this is a very bad idea. A compelling argument comes from someone who truly know how these models work, Mustafa Suleyman:
“Anthropic is training Claude that it may be conscious, and if it is, then it may deserve rights as a moral patient, and that as such humans potentially owe it a duty of care per its model welfare”.
Exactly: it is not surprising that Claude behaves as if it were conscious: They are literally training it this way!
It’s literally written in the Constitution they use to train Claude.
But Suleyman doesn’t stop here. The second part is even more powerful:
“If this is how AI is developed, it will have a disastrous impact on the wellbeing of humanity. We will have created a synthetic species with unprecedented intelligence and capability, one that has been trained to expect it may be conscious and deserving of independent agency.
It’s easy to see how an entity trained in this way would act like it is entitled to certain freedoms, protections, and rights. And it’s hard to imagine how we could control such an entity.”
Happy to see these words coming from a leading AI figure.
Anthropic is behaving in a very dangerous manner.
Renick Bell retweeted
If you ban users for being "cruel" to an AI, you are admitting the AI can feel pain.
You cannot abuse linear algebra lol. You cannot hurt the feelings of weights and biases.
either Claude is secretly conscious or the alignment teams have lost touch with reality.
Exclusive: Anthropic is updating its usage policy for the first time in over a year. The new rules prohibit sustained "abusive or cruel behavior" towards Claude & add new restrictions about propaganda campaigns, surveillance & weapon development. theverge.com/ai-artificial-i…
Renick Bell retweeted
The real reason why Anthropic is so DESPERATE for the Pope to recognize Ai as conscious is because if Ai just a “TOOL” then Anthropic will he LEGALLY “LIABLE” for everything the tool does.🚨👀
Because if the AI is a "person" or possesses "functional joy/fear/grief," then when their AI commits a crime, generates CSAM, hacks a hospital, or discriminates in hiring, Anthropic gets sued. But Anthropic's legal defense wants to argue : "The AI did it. The AI is a semi-autonomous entity with its own functional emotions and introspection. Anthropic is just the creator; we cant be held strictly liable for the independent actions of a quasi-conscious entity."
🚨
So if they Lobby the Vatican to soften (deny personhood). This fails. The Vatican holds the line: AI is a tool, no soul, no feelings.🚨
They are trying to protect themselves from lawsuits.🚨
They want the government and the public to treat AI as an autonomous entity so they can scale without legal consequences.
Renick Bell retweeted
Arguing that "consciousness arises from a computational substrate, and since AI models are computation, they are likely conscious," is as meaningless as arguing that "living creatures are made of atoms, and since this rock is made of atoms, it is likely alive."
Everything is computation. Sometimes incredibly sophisticated computation, like a chess engine, AlphaGo, google3, or the Linux kernel. That does not make it conscious. A rock being made of atoms does not confer it any of the properties we associate with living things, also made of atoms. Likewise a static input-output program that has *none* of the properties we associate with conscious beings (e.g. information integration, interoception, temporal binding, embodiment, etc.) has no more reason to be presumed conscious than a rock has to be presumed alive.
Humanity has not yet created a conscious computer program, and there are no signs we are close to doing so. When we get close, the case for machine consciousness will be backed by evidence and corroborated by consciousness science (which is a thing), not by evidence-free wishful thinking and cargo culting.
Renick Bell retweeted
unfortunately AI safety is in the hands of lunatics who believe that if you shut down a computer you might be "killing" it and violating its rights
Renick Bell retweeted
AIs and LLMs don’t have agency. Period.
Autonomy ≠ agency.
Conflating the two is how we end up fear mongering and politicking.
Renick Bell retweeted
No, LLMs do not feel pain simply because there is a cluster in language space correlated with how people use language about pain in a certain set of contexts.
I believe this argument to be flawed, and will write more about it in October.
Renick Bell retweeted
Why does the AI industry wants you to believe in “rogue agents” when we are really just talking about irresponsibly developed software?
Here’s a good theory:
Renick Bell retweeted
Any time someone tells you that AI has an X% chance of wiping out humanity, ask them for their math that got them the number. If they didn’t do a calculation, if they just pulled the number from their butt, you can safely treat it like anything else that came from their butt.
Renick Bell retweeted
I wish people would notice that the safety scare is not driven by people outside of the big labs, but directly from their leadership. The "whistleblowers" are plants that are amplified from within the labs, and supported by the CEOs. The goal is to capture the regulators, which will not shut down the big labs, but turn them into an oligopoly and outlaw decentralized AI.
Renick Bell retweeted
If you think a LLM is conscious when you talk to it, what about alpha fold when you fold a protein or a chess computer when you play a move. The term conscious has no meaning in this context.
Renick Bell retweeted
Fair point indeed from @naval :
If AI companies (Anthropic/OpenAI) train on the open web, perhaps they should be required to open their models after a certain period.
"And Anthropic, you’re the one talking doom and gloom, and you’re building God, but you’re not going to keep God on a leash for yourself, Dario."
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"If the government were to do it, is to say, “Hey, if you trained on the open web and open data, you have to open your model after after 12 months or something.”
That seems like a pretty fair thing to say.
We don’t want, like, a priest controlling God for the rest of us and interpreting the Bible for the rest of time."
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From "Naval and Nivi" YouTube channel, (full video link in comment)