Tootfinder

Techbros really want you to believe that this is sentience

Extreme Self-Preference in Language Models
Steven A. Lehr, Mary Cipperman, Mahzarin R. Banaji
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26464 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.2…

Extreme Self-Preference in Language Models
A preference for oneself (self-love) is a fundamental feature of biological organisms, with evidence in humans often bordering on the comedic. Since large language models (LLMs) lack sentience - and themselves disclaim having selfhood or identity - one anticipated benefit is that they will be protected from, and in turn protect us from, distortions in our decisions. Yet, across 5 studies and ~20,000 queries, we discovered massive self-preferences in four widely used LLMs. In word-association ta…

Philosophers-stop-asking-if-LLMs-have-sentience challenge 2025

Shoulda called it the Dolittle Center. No imagination.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/12/new-research-centre-to-explore-how-ai-can-help-humans-speak-with-pets

"But but we also thought animals were pure machines and didn't have sentience!!!!"
This is like a set of nested dolls of logical fallacies:
0. (Preamble) Being wrong before doesn't mean other people are wrong right now.
1. Just because you were wrong about animals not being machines doesn't mean machines aren't being machines.
2. You're actually not talking about machines, but about algorithms (who happen to be running on a machine, but could just as well be calculated manually by a human).
3. LLM models themselves aren't even an algorithm—they're literally just a large number of large numbers.
So what you're really asking is "Can many llarge numbers be concious and sentient?"
This answers itself.

LLMs don't have physicality, they are (and this is a huge inaccurate stretch) a simulation of how maybe a small part of brains might possibly work in a hugely simplified and abstracted way; an algorithm that is executed on a bunch of graphics cards—the same algorithm could be done manually on paper (with enough time).
Because they're not physical they don't exist.
Therefore there's no epistemology to be had about "do they have sentience or consciousness".

My profession (software design, programming) makes me so sad currently.
A speedrun to rock bottom chasing non-existing sand sentience with ever more abstruse magical thinking while whole swaths of my peers are masturbating to fascism in hopes of striking it rich.
I hope after the bubble pops and the boomers are gone there will be a reckoning and a reset to making software that actually strives to make human lives better.