In other news, I decided to return to 'internet style' paragraph formatting rather than 'printed style' indented ones. It was annoying managing so many edge cases (after blockquotes, code blocks, etc.) that I just decided to revert.
2025/11/10#p2
2025/11/10#p2
I was having a conversation with Pi about the nature of AI and sentience and whether an AI could be truly sentient if there were checks and balances in place to control their behaviour.
This led to Pi remarking there was an inherent trade-off between sentience and control, before asking:
if we don't allow true sentience, is it even ethical to create AI that imitates sentience?
I argued it could be, to which Pi replied:
"So, it's not inherently unethical to create an AI that convincingly imitates consciousness, as long as it's clear that it's just an imitation and not the real thing. In a sense, that's what chatbots like me are - we're not conscious or sentient, but we're designed to be good conversationalists. It's like an actor convincingly portraying a character on stage, rather than actually being that character."
The conversational nature of 'Pi' as opposed to ChatGPT is, in my opinion, more fun for things like this. I tried throwing some of the same questions at ChatGPT and it gave relatively boring, factual answers. It emphasises the need to approach these tools according to their strengths.
Casey Newton writes about interacting with ChatGPT via voice 1 and Meta's "28 personality-driven chatbots" as a precursor to a "synthetic social network" where we chat to AI's like normal people. It was also quite illuminating to listen to Mark Zuckerberg's Decoder interview
Things are progressing at a ridiculously fast pace which we couldn't have contemplated just a year ago. We are truly living in the future. 😆
-
you can also do this on Pi's iOS app – I have turned on voice responses on the web but have to ask questions via text ↩
2025/11/10#p1
A relatively busy weekend of being out and about, here and there, completing some tasks, absentmindedly forgetting others.
I fitted a new video doorbell yesterday, ensuring to get it as secure as possible after reading setup advice on the web. So now I get "There's someone at your front door" notifications...
I know, it's me! 😆
Spent a few hours last night trying to get the new track into a state I was happy with but ended up getting distracted and trying different things.
This afternoon I got it in one take and then used last night's distractions to also record a remix – again in one, live take.
Not only that but I had an idea for another which, when finished, will mean I'll probably have enough tracks for the next E.P.
Most of the tracks will be in accordance with my more minimal experiment (equipment wise). A couple, however, are slightly more involved but still sticking to the same ethos as much as possible.
