In which the talking pinball machine goes TILT
Interesting how the human half of discussion interprets the incoherent rambling as evidence of sentience rather than the seemingly more sensible lack thereof1. I’m not sure why the idea of disoriented rambling as a sign of consciousness exists in the popular imagination. If I had to make a guess2 it might have something to do with the tropes of divine visions and speaking in tongues combined with the view of life/humanity/sapience as inherently painful, either in a sort of buddhist sense or in the somewhat overlapping nihilist/depressive sense.
[1] To something of their credit, they don’t seem to go full EY and acknowledge it’s probably just a glitch.
[2] I’d make a terrible LessWronger since I don’t like presenting my gut feelings as theorem-like absolute truths.
> I remember when markov chains used to produce this exact form of perpetually looped gibberish, and most folks accepted it was an artifact from statistically completing the next token, not proof of god
Me too, but in part because I saw an IRC bot made in some 30 lines of Python do exactly that less than a month ago.