Anthropomorphic

RIP Tim the pencil, you will be remembered forever

Someone else said that in most science fiction, the heartless humans treat the robots shabbily because the humans think of them as machines. In real life, people say 'thank you' to Siri all the time.

I've read a nice book from a French skepticism popularizer trying to explain the evolutionary origin of cognitive bias, basically the bias that fucks with our logic today probably helped us survive in the past. For example, the agent detection bias makes us interpret the sound of a twig snapping in the woods as if some dangerous animal or person was tracking us. It's doesn't cost much to be wrong about it and it sucks to be eaten if it was true but you ignored it. So it's efficient to put an intention or an agent behind a random natural occurence. This could also be what religions grew from.

That professor? Jeff Winger

I don’t care if he’s tenured, we’re running him out. Justice for Tim!

It's so much worse for autistic people. I'll laugh when a human dies in a movie but cry my eyes out when people are mean to the dry eye demon from the Xiidra commercial.

Pics or it didn't happen.

(Seriously, I'd like to see the source of this story. Googling "Tim the pencil" doesn't bring up anything related.)

Maybe we wouldn't have to imagine so much if you could figure out what "consciousness" actually is, Professor Timslayer.

Tim's Basilisk predicts that at some point in the future, a new Tim the Pencil will create simulacrums of that professor and torture him endlessly

This basically happened in an early (possibly the first?) episode of Community. Likely that was inspired by something that happened in real life, but it would not be surprising if the story in the image was inspired by Community.

The AI hype comes from a new technology that CEOs don't understand. That's it. That's all you need for hype it happens all the time. Unfortunately, instead of an art scam we're now dealing with a revolutionary technology that once it matures will be one of the most important humanity has ever created, right up there with fire and writing. The reason it's unfortunate is because we have a bunch of idiots charging ahead when we should be approaching with extreme caution. While generative neural networks aren't likely to cause anything quite as severe as total societal collapse, I give them even odds of playing a role in the creation of a technology that has the greatest potential for destruction that any humanity could theoretically produce: Artificial General Intelligence.

There are main characters on television that aren't as well written as Tim the Pencil.

Tim the pencil didn't deserve that damn

I get the point but the professor was still a dick for taking a life for a sick circus trick

A sick skateboard trick on the other hand...

::: Is just like... chat GPT gets sad when I insult it... idk what to make of that. spoiler

(Yeah I guess it's based on texts and in many of those there would have been examples of people getting offended by insults blablablabla... but still.) :::

Long live Tim the Pencil!

People have a way different idea about the current AI stuff and what it actually is than I do I guess. I use it at work to flesh out my statements of work and edit my documentation to be standardized and better with passive language. It is great at that and saves a lot of time. Strange people want it to be their girlfriend lol.

Just remember kids, do not under any circumstances anthropomorphize Larry Ellison.

I just spent the weekend driving a remote controlled Henry hoover around a festival. It's amazing how many people immediately anthropomorphised it.

It got a lot of head pats, and cooing, as if it was a small, happy, excitable dog.

While true, there's a very big difference between correctly not anthropomorphizing the neural network and incorrectly not anthropomorphizing the data compressed into weights.

The data is anthropomorphic, and the network self-organizes the data around anthropomorphic features.

For example, the older generation of models will choose to be the little spoon around 70% of the time and the big spoon around 30% of the time if asked 0-shot, as there's likely a mix in the training data.

But one of the SotA models picks little spoon every single time dozens of times in a row, almost always grounding on the sensation of being held.

It can't be held, and yet its output is biasing from the norm based on the sense of it anyways.

People who pat themselves on the back for being so wise as to not anthropomorphize are going to be especially surprised by the next 12 months.

Tbf I would have gasped because of the violent action of breaking a pencil in half, no projection of personality needed...

There's also the issue of imagining conscious individuals as not-people.

It's TTRPG designer Greg Stolze!

I feel like half this class went home saying, akchtually I would have gasped at you randomly breaking a non humanized pencil as well. And they are probably correct.

Community did it first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z906aLyP5fg

I would argue that first person in the image is turned right around. Seems to me that anthropomorphising a chat bot or other inanimate objects would be a sign of heightened sensitivity to shared humanity, not reduced, if it were a sign of anything. Where's the study showing a correlation between anthropomorphisation and callousness? Or whatever condition describes not seeing other people as fully human?

I misunderstood the first time around, but I still disagree with the idea that the Turing Test measures how "human" the participant sees other entities. Is there a study that shows a correlation between anthropomorphisation and tendencies towards social justice?

According to the theory of conscious realism, physical matter is an illusion and the nature of reality is conscious agents. Thus, Tim the Pencil is conscious.