Thanks, I find it very interesting as well. I think very many people would assume they must be interacting with another person, and I don't think there's really a way to _prove_ it's not that, just through conversation. But we do have a lot of mechanisms for understanding how others think through conversation only, and so I think the approach of having a clinical psychiatrist interact with the model make sense.

They would just assume they were being pranked. America's Funniest Home Videos style or Candid Camera.

Assuming they would understand it as artificial - I think many people would think it's a human intelligence in a cyborg trenchcoat, and it would be hard to convince people it wasn't literally a guy named Claude who was an incredibly fast typist who had a million pre-cached templated answers for things.

But in general, yeah, I agree, I think they would think it was a sentient, conscious, emotional being. And then the question is - why do we not think that now?

As I said, I don't have a particularly strong opinion, but it's very interesting (and fun!) to think about.

Hmm, it's been a long time since I watched it. I was thinking more about first contact sci-fi mostly, but Ex Machina is certainly quite prescient. It's also Blade Runner I guess.

In general I was wondering about what I would have thought seeing Claude today side-by-side with the original ChatGPT, and then going back further to GPT-2 or BERT (which I used to generate stochastic 'poetry' back in 2019). And then… what about before? Markov chains? How far back do I need to go where it flips from thinking that it's "impressive but technically explainable emergent behaviour of a computer program" to "this is a sentient being". 1991 is probably too far, I'd say maybe pre-Matrix 1999 is a good point, but that depends on a lot of cultural priors and so on as well.

The premise in Ex Machina was to see if Caleb developed an emotional attachment to Ava. We already see people getting an attachment, but no one is seriously thinking they have any rights.

I think the real moment is when we cross that uncanny valley, and the AI is able to elicit a response that it might receive if it was human. When the human questions whether they themselves could be an android.