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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#191

Post by crocowhile »

chc wrote: post #38
crocowhile wrote: post #15

"Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent.1 All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language." This is what we, humans, do too when we talk. All these people talk about intelligence in such tautological terms... It's discouraging. We simply do not know if a machine is self-aware and most likely we will never will. Self-awareness is the ultimate subj…

That is what we do when we talk, but that is not all we do when we talk. In composing this comment, I am not just stringing together words to create what I think constitutes a maximally appealing response to your comment. I am trying to convey an idea that I believe with the goal of helping others to understand something. These language AIs do not have the capability of believing anything and do not have any goal but…

You do not see the tautology in your own statement: "These language AIs do not have the capability of believing anything" ?

If that is your starting assumption then, yes, they will never be sentient even when they will be. I am a neuroscientist. We do not know how the brain works and what causes an animal to be sentient. We do not know if a dog or a fruitfly are sentient in the way a human is. We know nothing about consciousness but you guys appear to be full of certainties about what can and cannot be self-aware.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#192

Post by wskinner »

rlue wrote: post #129
s1mon wrote: post #11

It sounds like despite all the stories about how hard it is to get through many rounds of difficult interviews at Google, they managed to hire someone who believed LaMDA is a 7 or 8 year old child. "Mr. Lemoine, a military veteran who has described himself as a priest, an ex-convict and an A.I. researcher, told Google executives as senior as Kent Walker, the president of global affairs, that he believed LaMDA was a c…

Everyone is giving Lemoine far too much credit. He's not an idiot; he's a charlatan. He's acting in bad faith and it should be extremely obvious to anyone who's tried to have a conversation with a chat bot before. Picture yourself sitting at a desk, typing messages into a program you wrote. You hit enter, you get a response. Then what? Silence. It waits idly for more input from you, the user. For all its talk of lone…

I agree he seems to be acting in bad faith, but the idea that a sentient being could not be “idle” until presented with input is not obviously true. Check out the novel Permutation City by Greg Egan for a fascinating exploration of this exact concept and its implications for consciousness.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#193

Post by rlue »

ALittleLight wrote: post #163
rlue wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is giving Lemoine far too much credit. He's not an idiot; he's a charlatan. He's acting in bad faith and it should be extremely obvious to anyone who's tried to have a conversation with a chat bot before. Picture yourself sitting at a desk, typing messages into a program you wrote. You hit enter, you get a response. Then what? Silence. It waits idly for more input from you, the user. For all its talk of lone…

The program can't generate more text without a prompt from you. That's how it was programmed. If sentient birds were judging you it would be unfair for them to determine you insentient because you couldn't fly. You are physically incapable of flight just as the chatbot is physically incapable of producing text unprompted.

"It's not the program's fault that it's totally incapable of having thoughts or experiences on its own; that's just how it was made! And, like, who's to say that's what sentience means, anyway?"

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#194

Post by crocowhile »

randomsearch wrote: post #37
crocowhile wrote: post #15

"Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent.1 All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language." This is what we, humans, do too when we talk. All these people talk about intelligence in such tautological terms... It's discouraging. We simply do not know if a machine is self-aware and most likely we will never will. Self-awareness is the ultimate subj…

“This is what we, humans, do too when we talk.” Citation needed. I mean, it’s possible right? That we’re just randomly sampling sentences. Maybe that’s all we do. But it’s a hell of a strong claim that necessitates strong evidence.

AI do not simply fish contents from an existing database. Instead, they use a repertoire to extract rules and create new instances, exactly as we do when we learn to speak. DALL-E can create an image of something even if it was not in its training set and a LamDA can create a sentence and even a concept that was not in its reading repertoire.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#195

Post by undreren »

crocowhile wrote: post #15

"Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent.1 All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language." This is what we, humans, do too when we talk. All these people talk about intelligence in such tautological terms... It's discouraging. We simply do not know if a machine is self-aware and most likely we will never will. Self-awareness is the ultimate subj…

> This is what we, humans, do too when we talk. All these people talk about intelligence in such tautological terms... It's discouraging.

But is it all that we do? And how do you know?

It seems too simplistic to be taken at face value that statistics, randomness and pattern matching would be the only ingredients necessary for intelligence and sentience.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#196

Post by cycomanic »

wruza wrote: post #164
cycomanic wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can not detect the difference between someone having something to say and mimicing what you are saying, is there a difference? That's essentially what the turing test is about is it not? Now if you are saying there is a difference no matter if you can detect it or not, I would argue you imply that sentience is an internal state that can not be tested. I don't consider that an acceptable outcome, because it can…

it can be used to declare anyone/everything non-sentient So what? My concern in this thread is that we collectively are holding on to the thread of terms of vague binary phenomena, which were never stressed before and are most likely a randomly emerged self-petting. All of that only has meaning in a context of our species. If you’re fine with something begging for help or expressing fear etc by knowing it has no unde…

You are aware of the historical precedents what happened when declaring people non-sentient?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#197

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

snowwrestler wrote: post #66
s1mon wrote: post #11

It sounds like despite all the stories about how hard it is to get through many rounds of difficult interviews at Google, they managed to hire someone who believed LaMDA is a 7 or 8 year old child. "Mr. Lemoine, a military veteran who has described himself as a priest, an ex-convict and an A.I. researcher, told Google executives as senior as Kent Walker, the president of global affairs, that he believed LaMDA was a c…

I have to wonder if he is a parent; I have a child around that age and there is zero chance they would sit around cheerfully answering questions from computer science researchers until they were done.

I suspect he didn't mean "it behaves like a 7/8 year old child in every way", mainly because he didn't say anything like that.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#198

Post by jcelerier »

mjburgess wrote: post #142
jcelerier wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question as someone entirely outside of any AI research: what's the I in AI then ? My life experience is very alike pattern matching the current situation to everything I've lived before sprinkled with chaotic emotional reactions due to outside events - heat, hunger, etc. I really don't feel like there's anything more than that when thinking, just the brain going through paths that one can recognize with time.

If I ask, "how did you like new york?" and you answer the question , sure, you can have you `I`. That requires having gone to new york, having tastes, having judgements, having memory -- having a subjectivity which is unique and composed of the history of your experiences which can be related to novel environemnts. It requres existing in a shared world we can both co-refer to with our words. It requires being embedde…

> That requires having gone to new york, having tastes, having judgements, having memory -- having a subjectivity which is unique and composed of the history of your experiences which can be related to novel environemnts. It requres existing in a shared world we can both co-refer to with our words. It requires being embedded in a space of social and physical significance.

are you saying that I would not be considered an intelligent being if I had a jar in a brain left with my thoughts since my birth ? I don't think that this is what humans mean by intelligence...

also I don't really see the fundamental difference between "tastes", "judgements" and "memory" - making a judgment, having an opinion on something, etc... is just stopping the brain from reasoning past a certain step and internally saying "this is good enough" most likely because this is tiring to our frail physical bodies. Like, I don't like eating eggs for instance, but that's just because I don't make the effort of convincing myself that I like them. There's no intelligence in this, just laziness.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#199

Post by cs137 »

rlue wrote: post #129
s1mon wrote: post #11

It sounds like despite all the stories about how hard it is to get through many rounds of difficult interviews at Google, they managed to hire someone who believed LaMDA is a 7 or 8 year old child. "Mr. Lemoine, a military veteran who has described himself as a priest, an ex-convict and an A.I. researcher, told Google executives as senior as Kent Walker, the president of global affairs, that he believed LaMDA was a c…

Everyone is giving Lemoine far too much credit. He's not an idiot; he's a charlatan. He's acting in bad faith and it should be extremely obvious to anyone who's tried to have a conversation with a chat bot before. Picture yourself sitting at a desk, typing messages into a program you wrote. You hit enter, you get a response. Then what? Silence. It waits idly for more input from you, the user. For all its talk of lone…

I really don't think this guy intended to run a hoax or generate publicity, given that he's made himself look foolish. I think he was actually seduced by the idea of a sentient computer. It's not that far a leap to go from the stance of well-respected people inside Google who believe we'll see artificial sentience within 30 years to believing that we've achieved it now with something like LaMDA.

We're all suspectible to this. The more time you spend with something, and the more time you spend wanting to see things, the more likely you are to catch a pattern that isn't really there. Have we achieved anything close to AGI? No, of course not. Are more and more people going to be fooled by what we have achieved? Yes, absolutely. The so-called Turing test is actually shockingly easy to pass.

I don't think Lemoine s an idiot. Maybe he's mentally ill; maybe he's not, but has been taken in for other reasons, just as people without biological mental illness are still susceptible to being taken in by cults.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#200

Post by cortic »

jchw wrote: post #16

Quoted post unavailable.

Its very likely that from a certain perspective the human brain might basically be a spreadsheet. Okay so the software and hardware are not familiar because evolution developed them instead of us. But we do appear to be very predictable in our actions and responses. Would the spreadsheet know if it was one? Even if the cell 'am i a spreadsheet' = 'no'?
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