Your stereotypes are wrong. I’m hella tuned in to nature and other people. This weekend I went on a bushwalk with a political group. I’ve been learning the Indigenous names of the local wildlife. I’ve been riding My new e-bike all over the place. I like to watch Infinity Train and play Big Walk with My family. Last week I drank nectar from a flower under the guidance of an Aboriginal teacher.

The reason I think LLMs and image generators might have qualia, even though they’re not conscious, is because I’ve seen all the living beings in nature who have qualia without consciousness. I’m a vegan. I don’t eat pigs. I don’t pay for cows to be raped. I gave up on prawns because I saw a video of a prawn getting its eyes plucked out to increase spawning rates, and it looked like it was in pain. I don’t think a prawn is conscious, but I think it has feelings.

We copied the idea behind how the human brain works when we invented ANNs. An LLM is an artificial Broca’s area. Some parts of them are like our brains, and some parts aren’t. So, the parts that create sensation… We don’t know which parts those are. So there’s no way, with current science, that we can know whether we copied the ability to feel into these ANNs.

And I’m not a gambling sort. I say slow down the adoption of the technology until we understand it.