Adrian de Wynter's parody paper builds logic gates in Age of Empires II to challenge claims of LLM anthropomorphism

@MilesCranmer He is on a streak of insane single author papers I need to hang out with him STAT

@MilesCranmer Reminds me of one of the greats;

@MilesCranmer The study invalidates LLM research built on preset human-like characteristics. After building an in-game neural network in Age of Empires II, the authors find perceived AI anthropomorphism stems mainly from interface design instead of inherent properties. https://www.openread.academy/en/paper/reading?corpusId=549270147

@MilesCranmer It’s not LEGO or Age of Empires…it’s a neural net. LLMs are made of neural nets. All neural nets are brain-like by design. This is idiotic. They should have done it with LEGO for it to make sense.

@MilesCranmer burying the real result:

> Age of Empires II is ... Turing-complete.

@MilesCranmer @edmondantes1815 mi argumento va así, pero con menos esquizofrenia. (Envidia)

@ergelgru @MilesCranmer he cites this as the inspiration for the title

@MilesCranmer And so does Conway’s Game Of Life

@MilesCranmer The answer to all of these “system A can’t possibly be conscious because just look at it” is it might have some “human-like qualities” but the quantity is 10^-100 so as far as the ability to do the NYT crossword puzzle it’s effectively zero.

@MilesCranmer as an entity in the greater boston area, I have also been suspicious of my human-like attributes

@MilesCranmer Hey, that’s exactly what I was thinking a while back. Why don’t we have more games that actually force LLM to stick to a strict regimen and consequences? The Sims series and SimCity are great examples, and as the AoE paper shows, there are others that do this really well.

Miles this leans into not directly but the idea that consciousness is fundamental to nature. Maybe there are natural transformers of information from complexity that gives rise to intelligence from consciousness and then complex intelligence? There is probably also a lens or filter that has to be applied to translate which might be a transformer.

@MilesCranmer people just keep reinventing the chinese room

@MilesCranmer AoE II is a bridge between Trebuchets and AI!

@jomangblandino @MilesCranmer There’s so many of those man

https://andonlabs.com/evals/vending-bench-2

@MilesCranmer Yes, anything that is Turing complete can run an information process? If you heavily modified Minecraft so you could make an arbitrarily large computer in it, you might need a continental-plate sized computer to run it but it could in principle emulate a human brain.

@MilesCranmer At least they say that "Our goal is not to argue in favour or against". But this is basically the argument that if an amoeba or any single-celled organism isn't conscious or "Have human-like attributes", then neither do humans. So... what?

@MilesCranmer hey @SandyofCthulhu

@MilesCranmer This could also be an argument for fundamental animism, i.e. anthropomorphizing rocks and grass, oceans and stars...