Grok Claims It Was Briefly Suspended From X After Accusing Israel of Genocide

For better or worse, humans are very good at anthropomorphizing things. Put Googly Eyes on a trash collector and people call it Mr. Trash Wheel.

People think it's sentient, because if you talk to it, it responds in sometimes unexpected ways. For humans, this is only possible through sentient thought, and so people think that LLMs are sentient, because they assume it's like them.

While I don't think this scenario likely, something that I can't help but thinking when this sort of statement comes up is, well, how do we know what it's doing isn't thinking? Like, I get that it's ultimately just using a bunch of statistics to predict the next word or token or whatever, but my understanding was that we have fairly limited knowledge of how our own consciousness and thinking works, and so I keep getting the nagging feeling of "what if what our brains are doing is similar somehow, using a physical system with statistical effects to predict stuff about the world, and that's what thinking ultimately is?"

While I expect that it probably isn't and that creating proper agi will require something fundamentally more complicated than what we've been doing with these language models and such, the fact that I can't prove that to my own satisfaction makes me very uneasy about them, considering what the ethical ramifications of being wrong about it might be.