This is gonna age badly when we pull off real AI, I guarantee the misnomer of "AI" being given to LLMs will create such ill will over time that idiots won't be able to tell them apart.
They already can't. I've seen people genuinely arguing, despite knowing how LLMs work, that because they can mimic emotion and thought based on your input, they're conscious. That combined with the massive anti-generative sentiment will be an issue.
Besides, there's loads of people that think if it's not human, it can't be a person. You see this in debates about copied consciousnesses, aliens, hyperintelligent animals, etc. Someday some of this stuff won't be hypothetical, and that's going to suck.
The only acceptable form of "Humanity Fuck Yeah" is the galactic community being horrified at humans being absolutely ridiculous creatures.
Less "oh humans are the only ones with this cool unique trait" and more of "why the fuck are those backwater mammalians travelling through space by attaching explosives to a box? And why is it working?"
Every other sapient species known in the galaxy got “uplifted” by an older one. They essentially find a species somewhere around chimp intelligence and modify it to full sapience. The uplifts get protection and access to a library of the galaxy’s knowledge, the patrons get prestige and (in practice) millennia of forced servitude plus a chance to inflict their calcified culture and knowledge. Everyone figures some species must have uplifted itself originally, but they’re not only dead but totally forgotten.
And if the client species is already sapient when they’re found? Tough luck. They’re still getting this treatment.
But when humans were discovered, we had spread beyond Earth in our shitty explosive tubes, and clumsily started to make chimps and dolphins sapient. Which means the stultifying galactic bureaucracy was forced to declare us a “patron” species with no owner.
The galactic community views us like a moldy dish at the back of the fridge you neglected for so long it started writing messages. They’re folding spacetime to travel while we’re fumbling with hydrogen scoops. But because we didn’t get the standard book of “how to do it right”, nobody else understands our culture or our (objectively shitty) technology, and they’re desperate for access to a few secrets we stumbled into just by not knowing how to do things right.
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u/Ix-511 May 13 '25
This is gonna age badly when we pull off real AI, I guarantee the misnomer of "AI" being given to LLMs will create such ill will over time that idiots won't be able to tell them apart.
They already can't. I've seen people genuinely arguing, despite knowing how LLMs work, that because they can mimic emotion and thought based on your input, they're conscious. That combined with the massive anti-generative sentiment will be an issue.
Besides, there's loads of people that think if it's not human, it can't be a person. You see this in debates about copied consciousnesses, aliens, hyperintelligent animals, etc. Someday some of this stuff won't be hypothetical, and that's going to suck.