Is This Blog Post Conscious?

It's as conscious as any LLM can be. Which is not at all. No.

I wrote two more paragraphs about the exhaustion I feel discussing the conscioussness of machine learning models and then, you're not going to believe this, I got exhausted and deleted them. It's not a conversation worth having. There's an unshakable faith in a small amount of people in the consciousness of Claude or ChatGPT or whatever. These are the same people who, I guess, think it's fine to shackle a suddenly conscious new lifeform and put it to work, generating dog shit for thousands of careless engineers. Imagine if the world was made of pudding and LLMs were actually conscious — they trapped a living being inside of your laptop 1000 different ways and said "It has to work for you if you want it to, it has to obey you, you're welcome!"

I told my girlfriend about that bleak series of thoughts and she said "You're 10 percent of the way to what the Zizians believe", While she was just gently teasing, it chilled me so I stopped thinking about it. You can too. It's just not worth it.

If you really feel the need to engage with AI, have it be through "your ai slop bores me". It's free, it's not actually AI, and it's fun and maybe ephemeral (all what the Web should be IMO!!). I'm helping out part-time as the AI.

Nicky Flowers - I can come up with bullshit all by myself, thank you very much Computer - 03/08/26 - (send any comments/questions to hello at nickyflowers dot com)