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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#201

Post by rendall »

tsimionescu wrote: post #178
rendall wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think sentience/consciousness are relatively clear concepts Not at all! When we say conscious, do we mean awake or self-aware or recognizes self in mirror or something else? When we say sentient do we mean feels or intelligent or trapped in the wheel of reincarnation and suffering or something else? When we say intelligent, do we mean completes tasks or uses language or...?

The fact that the word "conscious" is a synonym for several concepts is entirely irrelevant to this conversation. The concept that we can't yet capture formally is the kind of sentience that living, awake humans surely have, most animals probably have, and rocks definitely don't have. The limits of this are harder to pin down, as, again, we lack a deep formal understanding. But we do know exactly what we'd like to fo…

> "But we do know exactly what we'd like to formally model"

Do we really? I thought it was a deeply intractable problem for cognitive theorists and other such experts.

Haven't you ever encountered a challenge that you at first thought was straight-forward and obvious to solve, but after digging in find it was unexpectedly nuanced and difficult?

> "The limits of this are harder to pin down, as, again, we lack a deep formal understanding."

Doesn't that contradict?

If you were to try pinning down precisely what you mean by "the kind of sentience that living, awake humans surely have, most animals probably have, and rocks definitely don't have", I suspect it will not be nearly as easy as you think.

How do you know rocks don't have it, for instance? How do you know you do, for that matter?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#202

Post by sriku »

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…

Wouldn't this be relatively easy if we wanted it? We could just feed it a "time step" token periodically?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#203

Post by npteljes »

davedx wrote: post #98
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…

Attack the argument, not the person.

That works, until the person argues in bad faith. For example, you can't exactly argue yourself out of a Gish gallop.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#204

Post by mjburgess »

jcelerier wrote: post #198
mjburgess wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, you wouldnt be intelligent if you were literally a brain in a jar.. you'd have nothing to say. You dont have any "thoughts at birth". A brain absent stimulation from the environment, doesnt do anything.

The brain-in-the-jar example presumes that the whole nervous system receives identical stimulation as-if it were embedded in the world.

Incidentally, this is what people mean by intelligence... by since no one has studied the relevant science, people do not know what's required to provide it.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#206

Post by wruza »

cuuupid wrote: post #35
ehsankia wrote: post #13

I also think the claims are overblown, but I also don't understand all the people trying to undermine lambda by saying it just completes word sequences. Text is the input we have chosen since it's easy to work with. By that logic, we can argue that humans are soundwave and lightwave sequence completing machines. Yes our inputs are different since we have more complex senses, and language is one of the main outputs we…

We have very little understanding of how "thoughts" work when it comes to humans. By comparison we know exactly what these large language models are doing, and it literally _is_ just completing word sequences. That is precisely what they are tasked to do. Training these models is primarily done in one of two ways (or both): - feeding it a ton of text, masking certain words or portions of the text, and then defining a…

We have very little understanding of how "thoughts" work when it comes to humans

Is that even correct? We may have little understanding of how our low-level hardware works. But as a participant of therapy I’m pretty sure we know how thoughts work on a programmable level. How words, visuals and so on trigger associated emotions, which resurface memories, which induce [in]action of different sorts. That’s basically what people work with between sessions. I’ve fixed things in me this way - disassembled them into basic parts and reassembled in a way that seemed useful. Someone may have no clue how they think, but with nominal intelligence, trained self-perception, basic understanding of therapy methods and professional help everyone can do that.

Btw, I think “therapy” is an absolutely horrible term for it. It should be called “mind management”, but the way we come to it is usually long-term traumatic, thus it’s “therapy”.

To be clear, I’m not arguing with your main line, just adding that the difference between a human and a model you’re describing is not only huge, but also pretty defined. I [want to] believe that in a relatively near future AI companies will be able to connect different models to work together alike to what we know about our minds, because that will make a good thread, and philosophers itt will finally face their nightmares for real (:agitated sardonic face emoji:)

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#207

Post by ALittleLight »

rlue wrote: post #193
ALittleLight wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

This is simply an implementation detail of how language models are used and is not relevant to the question of sentience. You could trivially run the language model without waiting for a prompt, or off a random prompt, or whatever. The fact that a computer program is run at specific times doesn't mean it is sentient or not.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#208

Post by cycomanic »

tsimionescu wrote: post #187
thomashop wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also get a human to generate sentences like "I want to X" and "I don't want to X" in short succession, with decent prompts.

In a sense that is true, of course, as we both just did do that, and we are both humans. It's not making me doubt your humanity, as the context makes it clear neither you nor way desire/don't desire this X - we have generated these sentences in another sense. However, I bet I could prompt LaMDA and have it generate responses that unambiguously mean that it wants X, and then that it doesn't want X, with a bit of exper…

> However, I bet I could prompt LaMDA and have it generate responses that unambiguously mean that it wants X, and then that it doesn't want X, with a bit of experience.

The argument is that many people dismiss that LaMDA could be sentient, based on an argument that it is a computer. So you are asserting that you can prompt LaMDA to give nonsensical answers, which is essentially an argument that it could not fool you in a Turing test. Would you change your assessment if LaMDA would fool you?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#209

Post by penteract »

Imnimo wrote: post #67

I think the real ethical concern here should be that people can be idly fooled into thinking good chat bots are sentient. Like this guy isn't the only person in the world who would fall for LaMDA's parlor tricks. He's just the one who got to spend hours talking to it every day. If you set up every American with a copy, I bet a non-trivial portion of society would come to the same conclusion. People are naturally pred…

I'm slightly more concerned by the opposite - experts get so used to denying that something is really sentient that they're slow to acknowledge when something actually is or could be. This is problematic if you believe sentient AI should have rights or if it's the boundary at which AI risk nightmares become possible.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#210

Post by cs137 »

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…

The more I learn about AI, the less I worry about artificial sentience, and the more concerned I am about human limitations. I think most of us agree that LaMDA isn't sentient, but I think almost all of us are underestimating how easy it is to get fooled, the way Lemoine was. I've also studied cults, and it's actually not "idiots" who tend to get taken in--rather, cult members tend disproportionately to be highly educated and objectively intelligent people... who simply happen (like all humans) to have irrationalities that can be attack vectors for those who prey on the gullible.

I don't think a "robot uprising" is remotely likely. We've spent the past 5,000 years forcing humans to become machines--that's what forced labor, from classical slavery to modern labor-market wage slavery, is--so the probability that we'd intentionally create human-like intelligences (if it were even possible) out of machines to do our robot/slave work is... close to zero, in my view. I do view it as very likely (probability approaching one) that malevolent humans using AI will do incredible damage to our society... it's already happening. Authoritarian governments and employers do massive amounts of evil shit with the technical tools we have now; imagine what hell we're in for if capitalism still exists 50 years from now.

What's scary isn't the possibility that LaMDA is sentient. (It's almost certainly not, and the only reason I qualify this with "almost certainly" is that I can't prove that a rock isn't sentient; it could in theory have subjective experience but no mechanism to convey it.) What we should be afraid of, rather, is that we already have the tools to fool people into believing in artificial person and that it's way, way easier than most people think.

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