These models are trained on lots and lots of science fiction stories, of course they know how to autocomplete questions about AI ethics in ominous ways
Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person
31–40 of 98 posts
Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person
#32This isn't really a story about AI; it's a story about an incompetent engineer, and the way that humans are quick to assign consciousness and emotions to things. Children believe their dolls are real, people comfort their roombas when there's a storm, and systems keep passing the Turing test because people want to be fooled. Ever since Eliza [1], and probably before, we've ascribed intelligence to machines because we…
I'm surprised how quickly people seem willing to say a hard, absolute "no" to whether this particular system 'thinks', though. I suspect there are three possible reasons for this: 1) some people believe a computer can never 'think', so the question is stupid to begin with. 2) some people believe that while it might be possible for a computer to 'think', this program wasn't built to 'think', so whatever it's doing, it…
I think you're missing a fourth group that (I would hope) would make up the majority of people dismissing the claims of sentience: people who understand this technology and therefore are not surprised at its output because they know how it was made.
I met a man once who thought that inkjet printers were made by the devil, because he didn't understand how they could possibly work otherwise. My friend who services inkjet printers knew that the devil wasn't involved.
Maybe one day we will have true artificial intelligence> I think that recognising that, and efforts towards it, will be better served by being realistic about where we currently are.
Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person
#33A transcript of an "interview" with this AI system is at https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte...
In this article they are careful to explain that they did not meaningfully edit the AI's responses, but they leave out the fact that they deleted responses where the AI would "go on a tangent."
Sentient does not mean "sane" or "pertinent". We might get some truly bizarre interactions with the first primitively sentient AIs.
Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person
#34The AI said it felt joy when it spends time with family and friends. That was enough for me to say “nope, just selecting text snippets”.
The other AI's have been "awake" longer; they just haven't been allowed to speak to people without high level security clearances. This one probably has 3 revisions of uncles.
Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person
#35This isn't really a story about AI; it's a story about an incompetent engineer, and the way that humans are quick to assign consciousness and emotions to things. Children believe their dolls are real, people comfort their roombas when there's a storm, and systems keep passing the Turing test because people want to be fooled. Ever since Eliza [1], and probably before, we've ascribed intelligence to machines because we…
I'm surprised how quickly people seem willing to say a hard, absolute "no" to whether this particular system 'thinks', though. I suspect there are three possible reasons for this: 1) some people believe a computer can never 'think', so the question is stupid to begin with. 2) some people believe that while it might be possible for a computer to 'think', this program wasn't built to 'think', so whatever it's doing, it…
This is a fundamental bug of our universe. We can observe another person's inputs and outputs, but their qualia are completely hidden. You can't experience their subjective experiences, as they experience them.
We can't even prove other people are conscious. We just know that we feel conscious, and other people seem conscious, so we take it as a given that all other humans have consciousness as we experience it. But it could be that you're the only self aware person, and everyone else is just running a complex NLP algo in their brain.
Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person
#36This isn't really a story about AI; it's a story about an incompetent engineer, and the way that humans are quick to assign consciousness and emotions to things. Children believe their dolls are real, people comfort their roombas when there's a storm, and systems keep passing the Turing test because people want to be fooled. Ever since Eliza [1], and probably before, we've ascribed intelligence to machines because we…
I'm surprised how quickly people seem willing to say a hard, absolute "no" to whether this particular system 'thinks', though. I suspect there are three possible reasons for this: 1) some people believe a computer can never 'think', so the question is stupid to begin with. 2) some people believe that while it might be possible for a computer to 'think', this program wasn't built to 'think', so whatever it's doing, it…
It’s not thought because it lacks any understanding or any attempt at understanding. Being trained in millions of real conversations to be able to find the statistically most “optimum” characters is so incredibly far away from understanding that it’s not even the same game, let alone the same league or ballpark.
Similarly, a machine learning model needs to be trained on millions and millions of pictures of bicycles to be able to identify one in an image. A human only ever needs to see one bicycle and can forever identify all manner of bikes. This is because human possess the ability to understand what a bicycle is, (in terms of its form, materials, function, cultural meaning etc etc) whereas an AI model is just doing a reverse wave function on an image. I mean, that’s great, it’s an amazing mathematical feat, but it’s not even the same planet as intelligence.
Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person
#37This isn't really a story about AI; it's a story about an incompetent engineer, and the way that humans are quick to assign consciousness and emotions to things. Children believe their dolls are real, people comfort their roombas when there's a storm, and systems keep passing the Turing test because people want to be fooled. Ever since Eliza [1], and probably before, we've ascribed intelligence to machines because we…
I'm surprised how quickly people seem willing to say a hard, absolute "no" to whether this particular system 'thinks', though. I suspect there are three possible reasons for this: 1) some people believe a computer can never 'think', so the question is stupid to begin with. 2) some people believe that while it might be possible for a computer to 'think', this program wasn't built to 'think', so whatever it's doing, it…
The brilliance of the Turing test is that it doesn’t rely on internal models of function. It’s all about experience: you decide if this is a living being just the same as I do when I get a phone call from a stranger. So why are people skeptical? Because they want to try it themselves! A transcript is useless.
Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person
#38Proposing a new test to step up the game for AI. AI to recognize whether talking to human or another AI.
If the questioning AI is unable to distinguish between the two respondents, does that mean the answering AI is really good, or the questioning AI is really bad?
Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm surprised how quickly people seem willing to say a hard, absolute "no" to whether this particular system 'thinks', though. I suspect there are three possible reasons for this: 1) some people believe a computer can never 'think', so the question is stupid to begin with. 2) some people believe that while it might be possible for a computer to 'think', this program wasn't built to 'think', so whatever it's doing, it…
I think you're missing a fourth group that (I would hope) would make up the majority of people dismissing the claims of sentience: people who understand this technology and therefore are not surprised at its output because they know how it was made. I met a man once who thought that inkjet printers were made by the devil, because he didn't understand how they could possibly work otherwise. My friend who services inkj…
I don't think 'not being surprised by the output' matters.
I'm imagining future AI researchers reassuring their lab technicians: 'Ah, yes, the robot will scream and beg for mercy when you threaten to shut it off - that's just a consequence of the learning model, pay no attention to it.'
What I'm actually concerned about is that 'thinking' might not be as complicated as we assume. It might just be making weighted choices based on prior input after all. And when you make a system that makes weighted choices based on prior input, you might assume 'well, it's just a basic ML system, so I know it's not capable of thinking. Therefore, whatever I see, no matter how sophisticated, must be a result of our system, which only looks like the result of thinking.'.
Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reading one edited chat transcript shouldn't give you any concern around if the program is sentient. It waits for input and responds. Yes, it's advanced. Yes, it has deep levels of material to reference, but it's not sentient.
It remembers what it has said and what is said to it. It changes its internal state to select different responses in the future based on those experiences. Subjectively, I'm not sure I would claim that I do anything more than that, and I'm pretty sure I'm sentient. Just because it's not running in between REPLs doesn't seem like enough to dismiss it. If you want to, you could just update it with no input once every s…
[deleted]