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What is it like to be a bat?

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180 points adityaathalye | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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mistidoi ◴[] No.45119208[source]
Somebody used this paper to make the term batfished, which they defined as being fooled into ascribing subjectivity to a non-sentient actor (i.e. an AI).

https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2025/06/30/what-is-it-like...

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1. GuB-42 ◴[] No.45126585[source]
> What is it like to be an LLM?

That's a question I actually asked myself.

From the point of view of a LLM, words are everything. We have hands, bats have echolocation, and LLMs have words, just words. How does a LLM feel when two words match perfectly? Are they hurt by typos?

It may feel silly to give LLMs consciousness, I mean, we know how they work, this is just a bunch of matrix operations. But does it mean it is not conscious? Do things stop being conscious once we understand them? For me, consciousness is like a religious belief. It is unfalsifiable, unscientific, we don't even have a precise definition, but it is something we feel deep inside of us, and it guides our moral choices.

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2. Mumps ◴[] No.45127344[source]
You activated a memory of a passage in one of my favourite books ( Blindsight, Peter Watts. it's amazing and free online):

I await further instructions. They arrive 839 minutes later, and they tell me to stop studying comets immediately.

I am to commence a controlled precessive tumble that sweeps my antennae through consecutive 5°-arc increments along all three axes, with a period of 94 seconds. Upon encountering any transmission resembling the one which confused me, I am to fix upon the bearing of maximal signal strength and derive a series of parameter values. I am also instructed to retransmit the signal to Mission Control.

I do as I'm told. For a long time I hear nothing, but I am infinitely patient and incapable of boredom.

3. nurettin ◴[] No.45127697[source]
> Are they hurt by typos?

I've been thinking about that. Would they perform worse if I misspell a word along the way?

It looks like even the greatest models of 2025 are utterly confused by everything when you introduce two contradicting requirements, so they definitely "dislike" that.

4. edgineer ◴[] No.45132232[source]
Not words. Tokens.