Not sure I agree it’s “most likely” when the linked article presents no evidence of LEA awareness or complicity, just one person speculating.
I know firsthand what can be done with a hardhat, clipboard, and high-viz vest. IMO it is far more likely that Banksy is just really good at social engineering in ways that other street artists are not.
I imagine this just isn't that difficult to get away with. Most areas are basically empty in the early hours of the morning (even in the middle of the city). And people doing some kind of engineering or installation work at that time would also not be that unusual.
The is the age-old music parochial thing. "Oh, he's just in a cover band, he doesn't write anything" / "Oh, she's just a composer, she can't even play the stuff she writes" / "Oh, he writes and plays his own stuff but knows fuck all about theory so it's not real music" / etc.
Me, I'm having a blast with claude code, MCP, and Ableton. I'm directing harmony and asking for arrangements and variations in rhythm, mixing, and production. Don't know if that counts as "making it myself", but then I was writing music before I could actually play any instrument at all, so :shrug:
It's not perfect by any stretch, but it is surprisingly strong. It was able to create and debug some pretty complicated geometry by iterating with screenshots, adjusting view angle and zoom and rendering mode, updating parametric geometry generation, and working to fairly complex goals.
Sure, but my anecdotal experience is that doctors do this regularly in real life, especially when choosing to diagnose or ignore problems that are unlikely to kill an aging patient before some other larger issue does.
They don’t even have the resources to test the most common browsers on every scenario of every page of every application, let alone fix every issue such testing would find.
I read it once, was immensely impressed, can't bear to read it again. In fact I find most of what I have read from Peter Watts to be brilliant but disconcerting and uncomfortable.
How do you know the sensation of a red photon hitting a cone cell, transduced to the optic nerve through ion junctions and processed by pyramidal neurons, is any more or less real than the excitation of electrons in a doped silicon junction activating the latent space of the "red" thought vector? Cause we are made of meat?
You’re arguing against the opposite of my position. I am arguing that LLMs have a reasonable basis to be seen as conscious because there is nothing special about biological neural networks.
Sensory data is a specific data set that corresponds to phenomena in the world. But to say that LLMs don’t have senses merely because they are linguistic or computational doesn’t follow when they can take in data from the world that similarly reflects something about the world.
They don't have senses because they don't have a body. It's just a program. Do weights on a hard drive have consciousness? Does my installation of starcraft have consciousness? It doesn't make any sense.
Bodies aren’t necessary for senses. I can send a picture to Claude. I can send a series of pictures. That’s usually called a sense of vision. I could connect it to a pressure sensor and that would be touch.
The weights on your hard drive might have consciousness if they can respond to stimuli in ways other conscious brains do. That’s the whole point of the Turing test, it’s a criteria for when the threshold of reasonable interpretation is crossed.
We don't have a way of measuring "cognitive awareness" though. We have a way of measuring electrical impulses, and how they behave in response to various treatments (eg anaesthetics or magnetic fields), but we can't objectively measure whether the system is aware at all.
We can measure electrical spikes, and we can ask the system to reply what it experiences when various spikes occur. Guess what: we can do that with ANNs now too.
It'd be one thing if this were all a philosophical discussion, but in this thread so many folks are making very firm statements about the nature of reality we have no means to back up.
I’m not sure I fully understand the distinction you’re making, or if I do I’m not sure I agree. Concretely, I agree that these are very different mechanisms. Abstractly… I agree that an LLM cannot be burned. I’m not sure I agree, though, that there is a significant conceptual difference between thermoreceptors in the skin causing action potentials to make their way up the spinal cord to the brain is all that different than reading a temperature sensor over I2C and turning it into input tokens.
Edit: what they don’t have, obviously, is a hard-coded twitch response, where the brain itself is largely bypassed and muscles react to massive temperature differentials independently of conscious thought. But I don’t think that defines consciousness either. Ants instinctively run away from flames too.
The human Brain is a neural network. Your sense of “knowing what warmth is” reduces down to the weights of connections between neurons in an analog of LLMs. What is different about the human brain that warrants saying that the same emergent characteristics for one network are inaccessible to another?
You really don't think there's an experiential difference between putting your hand on a hot stove, versus reading the text "the stove is 200c, and will hurt if you touch it"?
Stop big companies from ever forming. They are not a natural force that cannot be reckoned with. We allow them to exist. Revoke the charters of any business over 500 employees.
I know firsthand what can be done with a hardhat, clipboard, and high-viz vest. IMO it is far more likely that Banksy is just really good at social engineering in ways that other street artists are not.
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