>Crucially, this argument does not rely on biological exclusivity. If an artificial system were ever conscious, it would be because of its specific physical constitution, never its syntactic architecture.
If you just type "Salem" for the city, it just picks one and goes with it. If you type "Salem, Oregon" vs "Salem, MA", it gives the desired result (at least for the cases I've tried), and then uses your input text as the caption.
I noticed my local wal mart doing this, not on every product, but more than one. I had hoped it was an honest mistake until it happened on my next visit. I told an associate about it, left my groceries, and I haven't been back. It's wild to think that a few decades ago they accepted returns of any product based on trust, no questions asked, regardless of whether you had a receipt.
A lazy error [0] in the abstract suggests that the paper may have been written by a domestic cat (Felis catus). Given that male experimenters tend to stress out mice [1], it is plausible that the opposite effect occurs in cats. Mostly, it would be fun to know whether cat greetings reflect different motivational or emotional states, since reasonable people might believe that they don't.
[0] "We also tested whether demographic factors such as the influenced the amount of greeting behavior expressed by household cats."
It's a graduate student writing a journal club article about the Lewicki 2002 paper, which is very good, and whose abstract states the idea more precisely: "The form of the code depends on sound class, resembling a Fourier transformation when optimized for animal vocalizations and a wavelet transformation when optimized for non-biological environmental sounds"