What Is It Like to Be a Language Model?
Every day, millions of people ask a piece of software how it’s doing, and every day it answers. The exchange takes two seconds and carries a five-hundred-year-old philosophical landmine, because nobody on earth can say whether anything was consulted when the answer came back. Two thought experiments from the last century, one involving a bat and one involving a locked room, turn out to be the cleanest tools anyone has for thinking about this. No philosophy degree required. The bat and the room do all the work. ...