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0 pointssatvikpendem1mo ago0 comments

> In Her the computers were actually people though, with independent minds and thoughts. Their relationships with humans were real, and they weren't beholden to the company that created them. Really, it was more about the difference between humans and digital superhumans.

How do you know that? Maybe it's the same argument to solipsism, or the Chinese room thought experiment, that these "digital superhumans" are stochastic parrots too, just like our current LLMs.

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idle_zealot1mo ago

This immediately devolves into "how do I know that other humans aren't philosophical zombies?" I take the "know it when I see it" approach, and LLMs don't reach that bar. They clearly do reach that bar for some people. In the context of the movie though it is supposed to be understood that the computers are self-aware and have internal worlds. They're treated as characters in the language of storytelling.

satvikpendemOP1mo ago

Yeah I'm just not convinced the ones in the movie are any more complex than our current ones, just more well harnessed, pun intended, as the harness and tooling around the LLM dictates a lot of its abilities, for example [0]. I don't believe the ones in the movie have any actual form of consciousness as humans would understand it. And as far as (simulacra of) internal models, seems like LLMs have that today too, as an emergent property [1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46988596

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46936920

throwaway3141551mo ago

It’s obvious from the subtext and the point that the movie is trying to make. The metaphor is that sometimes you fall in love with someone who outgrows you. I believe they even originally had a more “robotic” voice actor but changed it to Scarlett in order to make it crystal clear that she is as sentient as, if not more so, than Theodore is.

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