I did some analysis of the modlog and found this:
Ok, bigger instances ban more often. Not surprising, because they have more communities and more users and more trouble. But hang on, dbzer0 isn’t a very big instance. What happens if we do a ratio of bans vs number of users?
Ok, so lemmy.ml, dbzer0 and pawb are issue an outsized amount of bans for the number of users they have… But surely the number of communities the instance hosts is going to mean they have to ban more? Bans are used to moderate communities, not just to shield their user-base from the outside. Let’s look at the number of bans per community hosted:
Seems like dbzer0 really loves to ban. Even more than the marxists and the furries! What is it about dbzer0 that makes them such prolific banners?
Raw-ish numbers and calculations are in this spreadsheet if anyone wants to make their own charts.
I usually disagree with you about everything but I think you have a valid point here. This was an issue I studied very closely when I was in university, and you’re right, no one has the slightest clue how consciousness works. Saying “oh ChatGTP is just a statistical machine so it can’t be conscious” is like saying “oh the human brain is just a bunch of neural firings so it can’t produce consciousness”. In both cases, consciousness is not an obvious end result, but here we are.
That said, personally I don’t think ChatGTP is conscious, but it’s wrong for people to act like it being a philosophical zombie is obvious; the possibility of it being conscious is actually compatible with most nonreligious people’s belief systems already. Unfortunately the anti-AI hate on Lemmy won’t allow people to see the nuance on this discussion and they will interperet this as me somehow defending AI slop, which I am in no way trying to do.
The source of the whole problem is that OpenAI did something weird.
If OpenAI had said “It’s not conscious, it’s your p-zombie slave”, that would make perfect sense and the anti-ai crowd would be saying the opposite.
But instead, OpenAI said “It’s your personal conscious willing slave” and people instinctively started saying the exact opposite. It’s because there are science bros who hate OpenAI because they doubt the claims, and environmentalists and artists and socialists who hate it for the other reasons, and the various groups have allied over their hatred and adopted one another’s beliefs.
Now, I’m an environmentalist, an enjoyer of good art, a socialist, and a vegan. So I hate OpenAI over the established lines of all of those philosophies. But because the science bros complained louder earlier and have more social influence, they joined the AI hate community and spread their perspective first. And that results in people having no idea how to fit the vegan perspective into any of this.
TL;DR: People choose their beliefs according to political allegiance moreso than logic, and OpenAI chose its enemies in a weird way.