Gary Marcus Mocks AI Consciousness Claims: 'Roget's Thesaurus Clusters Pain Words — Is It Conscious?'
GaryMarcus · x · 2026-09-21
Gary Marcus sarcastically 'breaks news' that Roget's Thesaurus clusters words for pain together — and even separates physical pain words from the rest — asking 'Could it be... conscious?' The jab satirizes arguments that treat LLMs clustering distress-related concepts as evidence of consciousness, implying that by that standard a 19th-century thesaurus would qualify too.
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