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The Thoughts the Civilized Keep

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Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep

#21

Post by thatjoeoverthr »

sbierwagen wrote: post #15
Applejinx wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't come with PURPOSE unless you force it to have some. Which is a perfectly fine avenue to take, I think. But without purpose, what you get is hallucinatory mockeries of meaning: trippy, but if it was consciousness you'd be looking for severe organic damage. Purpose doesn't automatically mean civilized, but you can't get to civilized without purpose. It's an okay word to use for outlining what's missing. AI o…

You're proposing that the... facebook feed is "more conscious" than GPT-3?

Seems like an interesting thought. The feeds have a purpose or agenda, actively influence real people in real life, and do so in a way that perpetuates their own existence. As long as they’re effective, they have real world institutions to support them. As it happens, they are perpetually learning and growing. Putting that next to GPT3, it’s like an intelligent rescue dog next to a horse that counts.

Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep

#22

Post by TeMPOraL »

jerf wrote: post #8
ctoth wrote: post #2

> Understanding is beyond GPT-3’s reach because understanding cannot occur in an isolated computation or behavior, no matter how clever. Ah, right, it won't work because it doesn't have a soul. Got it.

No, if you study how GPT-3 works, it becomes pretty clear that that model can't really produce "understanding", even if we can't clearly define what that is very well. And I don't just mean this from the old point of view of "if we understand it, it's not AI anymore", I mean, the model has serious fundamental limitations. One of them is that it's static, so, once trained, it doesn't learn from its future input. Anoth…

> there is something there

There is indeed. I'll recount my own words after my first proper exposure to the model, in the form of playing custom stories in AI Dungeon:

"I played more of it today, and I can confirm that prolonged exposure makes me feel like I'm half awake, and half in a dream - particularly when the real world interrupts, I feel like I didn't fully wake up.

What's worse, whenever I tried to talk to a real person today, I've felt like I'm just feeding words to an AI, and anticipated "story" to evolve.

Never before has a game messed up with my mind so badly. I'm not sure if it's safe."

To which I got a reply perfectly summarizing the phenomenon:

"AI Dungeon feels a bit like a fever-dream."

--

It's been a year since; thinking back, I feel the trick here is, GPT-3 crosses the threshold of being able to produce plausible and interesting text - where by "interesting" I mean "almost, but not quite, unpredictable". The way other people and their stories are interesting - their words aren't totally random, you have this feeling for the possible trajectories the conversation can take, but you can't quite guess what they're going to say next. GPT-3 does that well enough that it's easy to suspend disbelief and feel as if you're dealing with a mind. But then the feelings that arise in you, that's just you projecting - engaging your mental machinery for dealing with other minds.

Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep

#23

Post by shrimp_emoji »

Applejinx wrote: post #10
ctoth wrote: post #2

> Understanding is beyond GPT-3’s reach because understanding cannot occur in an isolated computation or behavior, no matter how clever. Ah, right, it won't work because it doesn't have a soul. Got it.

It doesn't come with PURPOSE unless you force it to have some. Which is a perfectly fine avenue to take, I think. But without purpose, what you get is hallucinatory mockeries of meaning: trippy, but if it was consciousness you'd be looking for severe organic damage. Purpose doesn't automatically mean civilized, but you can't get to civilized without purpose. It's an okay word to use for outlining what's missing. AI o…

It's a neocortex that doesn't have the rest of the brain. : p

Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep

#24

Post by blamestross »

sbierwagen wrote: post #15
Applejinx wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't come with PURPOSE unless you force it to have some. Which is a perfectly fine avenue to take, I think. But without purpose, what you get is hallucinatory mockeries of meaning: trippy, but if it was consciousness you'd be looking for severe organic damage. Purpose doesn't automatically mean civilized, but you can't get to civilized without purpose. It's an okay word to use for outlining what's missing. AI o…

You're proposing that the... facebook feed is "more conscious" than GPT-3?

The facebook feed is at least an online system vs a static model, so YES.

Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep

#25

Post by TeMPOraL »

sbierwagen wrote: post #15
Applejinx wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't come with PURPOSE unless you force it to have some. Which is a perfectly fine avenue to take, I think. But without purpose, what you get is hallucinatory mockeries of meaning: trippy, but if it was consciousness you'd be looking for severe organic damage. Purpose doesn't automatically mean civilized, but you can't get to civilized without purpose. It's an okay word to use for outlining what's missing. AI o…

You're proposing that the... facebook feed is "more conscious" than GPT-3?

Probably, yes. It's interesting how consciousness could be a matter of drawing boundaries.

A well-known example are the ants: individual ants are somewhat dumb, barely above simple chemical seekers. But the ant colony behaves as a single organism, and quite smart at that.

Other examples include cities, nations, corporations - it kind of feels like these organizations have minds of their own, with individual humans being cells, and the bureaucracy forming a computational substrate.

In the same vein, Facebook feed could be seen as a mind of its own. So could the entire human civilization.

Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep

#26

Post by djokkataja »

> Understanding is beyond GPT-3’s reach because understanding cannot occur in an isolated computation or behavior, no matter how clever. Understanding is not an act but a labor. Labor is entirely irrelevant to a computational model that has no history or trajectory in the world.

For more along these lines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_cognition

Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep

#27

Post by jacobr1 »

Jtsummers wrote: post #20
lolwut987 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s wrong to say it doesn’t want anything, it’s solely motivated to minimize training error. If you align what minimizing train error means with a larger purpose, it will seemingly make magic happen. Just like you, online, trying to figure out how to turn this into copulatory success. It doesn’t matter if you succeed but don’t understand why, only that you succeed.

Is it motivated or is it just what it does? Is your thermostat motivated to minimize the temperature difference in a particular direction as well or is it just a machine that does that? Is your bicycle motivated to stay upright when you ride it or is just a consequence of physics (and halfway decent balance)?

Are you motivated to "find love?" Or just mechanistically following your genetic drive for reproduction?

Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep

#28

Post by jacobr1 »

lolwut987 wrote: post #19
majormajor wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simulating that brain will require you to provide some sort of inputs and do something with the outputs. Which gets you into questions of "what does this simulated brain want" once again. How much of human desire and behavior comes from the body? I want to avoid pain (signals that my body sends to my brain). I want to experience pleasure (also signals that my body sends to my brain). If you simulate a body with the s…

Yes, I often have to consider the context of the excel spreadsheets on my VMs, because you can’t know how to run a machine without knowing what it wants at a high level.

Given this is HN, I honestly can't tell if you are being genuine or snarky.

Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep

#29

Post by [deleted] »

jacobr1 wrote: post #27
Jtsummers wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it motivated or is it just what it does? Is your thermostat motivated to minimize the temperature difference in a particular direction as well or is it just a machine that does that? Is your bicycle motivated to stay upright when you ride it or is just a consequence of physics (and halfway decent balance)?

Are you motivated to "find love?" Or just mechanistically following your genetic drive for reproduction?

[deleted]

Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep

#30

Post by AnimalMuppet »

Applejinx wrote: post #10
ctoth wrote: post #2

> Understanding is beyond GPT-3’s reach because understanding cannot occur in an isolated computation or behavior, no matter how clever. Ah, right, it won't work because it doesn't have a soul. Got it.

It doesn't come with PURPOSE unless you force it to have some. Which is a perfectly fine avenue to take, I think. But without purpose, what you get is hallucinatory mockeries of meaning: trippy, but if it was consciousness you'd be looking for severe organic damage. Purpose doesn't automatically mean civilized, but you can't get to civilized without purpose. It's an okay word to use for outlining what's missing. AI o…

GPT-3 is a moderately proficient author with nothing to say. The problem isn't the proficiency, it's the lack of content.

Some of us here despise the writing style of The New Yorker. The writing is beautiful, literary, but it takes it forever to say anything. GPT-3 is like that, but worse, because it has nothing to say.

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