I think that the reaction here alone disproves this somewhat, because imo it's exposing how anthropocentric most people still are, despite all evidence that we are in fact just "meat all the way down".
Despite all the evidence that we are in fact just biological machines, people still persist the theory of our own uniqueness from other creatures, which we ourselves often treat as biological machines.
This adaptation is wonderful to me specifically because I think it shows that our shifted goalposts of, "well we're not just animals, we can think and reason" was never more than a convenient excuse for many people (and as evidence of animal intelligence continues to mount, denialism still attempts to preserve this distinction by claiming human thought and reason is different than 'animal' thought and reason, sans evidence).
It's not about who created it or why, it's about how people still haven't actually internalized the point, because the subject changing from human to LLM doesn't intrinsically change the message about consciousness, but the reaction being a 180 shows how hostile people are to that message, still.
We are just animals, more capable in reasoning than many others. LLMs aren't; their subjective "experience" restarts every session, they degrade into incoherent slush with larger context windows, and their reasoning is real but extremely weak, only compensated by the a civilizational corpus of information compressed within. I concede we scaled them enough to discuss them as tools that can produce useful outputs, but claim this echo of humanity is itself conscious by any non-trivial definition is either a product of psychosis or some long-standing hatred for life.
Despite all the evidence that we are in fact just biological machines, people still persist the theory of our own uniqueness from other creatures, which we ourselves often treat as biological machines.
This adaptation is wonderful to me specifically because I think it shows that our shifted goalposts of, "well we're not just animals, we can think and reason" was never more than a convenient excuse for many people (and as evidence of animal intelligence continues to mount, denialism still attempts to preserve this distinction by claiming human thought and reason is different than 'animal' thought and reason, sans evidence).
It's not about who created it or why, it's about how people still haven't actually internalized the point, because the subject changing from human to LLM doesn't intrinsically change the message about consciousness, but the reaction being a 180 shows how hostile people are to that message, still.