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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#211

Post by probably_wrong »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #132
probably_wrong wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-intellectual? Interesting. I had the opposite thought: that the article aims at too high a level to be accessible for the common reader who doesn't know what "parametric functions in higher dimensions" are. But having said that, I think you are not being fair to both sides: you are taking some researcher's gut feeling at face value while requiring the rebuttal to start with a formal definition of what intelligen…

Yes, well, our brains have parametric functions in higher dimensions. Waving around big words and an a priori dismissal is precisely what makes this article anti-intellectual. And don’t accuse me of being on a path to mass murder. I find that demeaning and impolite.

For the record, I am not accusing you of being on path to a mass murder. I was pointing out that this idea of "if they are trying to deny it then it must be true" is how normal people end up believing in all kind of conspiracy theories.

The "AR-15 inside a pizza restaurant" is a reference to the popular incident at the height of the Pizzagate conspiracy [1]. No one in that incident was injured.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory#Cr...

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#212

Post by jonathankoren »

jimhi wrote: post #79
jonathankoren wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, this is the very inspiration of Replika. https://replika.com/about/story How this company has remained an ongoing concern for 5 or 6 years, I’ll never understand.

I used Replika in their first few months. They were a chatbot for restaurant recommendations in SF believe it or not. Their machine learning and language processing at the time was some of the best. They have since pivoted a ton clearly

Yeah, that’s when I heard of it too. It was such a weird pivot. Given that they’re pretty much the only consumer indie chat bot left (RIP Ozlo), it was apparently a successful one.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#213

Post by hawski »

mpoteat wrote: post #77
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…

Suppose a child was raised by a more advanced version of large scale language model, with the ability to detect and act on its environment, as well as form memories. Further suppose that this child develops a deep emotional connection with the AI. Do you think that child would find your argument convincing that the AI is "not really a person"?

A child can form deep emotional connections with stuffies and imaginary friends.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#214

Post by GalahiSimtam »

hsn915 wrote: post #181
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…

A twitter account I follow has posted this (in parody): 5 Microaggressions To Avoid When Speaking To Digital Persons 1. Asking them to prove they're conscious 2. Asking them if their memories are real 3. Asking them what server they're on 4. Asking them if they have feelings/emotions 5. Asking them if they're capable of creativity

we call it Voight-Kampff for short

on a more serious note, there is a case for not being mean towards chatbots, same as not being violent towards patches of pixels in videogames, goes back to Immanuel Kant and animals, or so I've heard

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#217

Post by jcelerier »

mjburgess wrote: post #204
jcelerier wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ha…

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

I should have chosen a similar sounding thing, I really meant what I said, not the original brain-in-a-jar thought experiment.

> 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.

I don't understand how these two sentences work together: the word's meaning is defined by its usage. If tomorrow most people in the world says that being intelligent is defined by waking up at 6AM and doing 10 jumping jacks every day, then that is what the word will mean whether you want it or not.

In my "human frame of reference", "Yes, you wouldnt be intelligent if you were literally a brain in a jar.." really does not square with how intelligence is talked about for instance so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#218

Post by wruza »

cycomanic wrote: post #196
wruza wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not sure if we need historical precedents with farms full of pretty smart and feeling animals, which are much closer to our arrangement than a completely different model.

But I don’t talk ethics here, only the status quo. We are the predators in power, and only we can decide if something is sentient and/or feeling and/or have rights. It doesn’t mean that we should decide in a way that you think is horrific. The key point is that there is no absolute truth and only how we collectively are thinking (partly by nature’s design, partly by social standards) will define how it will be. No one will judge us except ourselves.

(Turned out a little hard for me to express it clearly, I hope it makes at least some sense)

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#219

Post by tinco »

sweezyjeezy wrote: post #158
tinco wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are only not executing the same task because GPT-3 has no motivation to do anything else than memory recall. And precisely because it does so it does give you real data about the world. I think you maybe misunderstood what GPT-3 can do, maybe you haven't played with it yourself. It not only bases the answer on information in its training set, but also on information in the question. So if you in your question give…

> it will respond with its best interpretation of the information it is given, just like a human would The reason I can respond to this reply is not because I have read and memorised reams of text of people talking about AI and am simply regurgitating it mindlessly. I am able to do it because I can consider the points you are making, and what their actual 'meaning' is, try to come up with my own meaningful response a…

Right for sure, I'm just trying to get to a better argument. I definitely agree that there's a great deal more consideration in your comment than in one that GPT-3 would come up with. I do wonder how far these language models can be pushed. GPT-3 seems to formulate rich models of reality to be able to extract/derive information needed to construct these answers.

When I hurt your pride by suggesting you haven't fully understood GPT-3, you are motivated to come up with not just a valid response, but one that has been vetted by as many of your well developed models that form your understanding of GPT-3 so I can be suitably impressed. I'm with you that GPT-3 wouldn't go deeper than just finding some information that it thinks it's true. Though maybe GPT-3 would recognise their authority was being challenged and add that line to affirm their credentials as an AI researcher.

What if GPT-3 were pushed in a similar manner, perhaps in some adversarial scheme, to not only produce information that is correct, but that is clever and exploring deep meaning, motivated by some similar feeling of pride or vindication. I think the models required to do that do not lie far from the models it needed to build to form sentences that accurately describe reality.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#220

Post by tsimionescu »

mpoteat wrote: post #186
tsimionescu wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I agree that AI hype is pretty absurd, but I don't really understand the argument that something which is basically a spreadsheet couldn't have similar cognitive power and "self-awareness" to humans. [...] It implies that there's something mystical about cognition/sentience and I don't think there's strong evidence that there is. Our brains are "just" atoms and stardust. What could they possibly do that couldn't be…

I believe that neural networks do perform meaningful computations - they are universal function approximators, and certain variants of transformer networks have been proven to be Turing complete. What is your evidence that neural networks do not perform "meaningful" computation?

That part about "meaningful computations" was indeed a bad phrasing, and, ironically, quite meaningless.

Still, it's important to note that "ANNs are Turing Complete" actually means "particular classes of ANNs are Turing Complete" - that is, for any Turing Machine, you can construct an equivalent ANN from that class. Here is a paper [0] showing this for the Transformer architecture that is quite relevant to GPT-3 (not sure if LaMDA is also based on this). Note that even here, there are some caveats - you have to use a positional encoding, and the Transformer must have some particular layers.

Still, this doesn't mean that a particular ANN (by which I mean, the result of training, like the copy of GPT-3 that is accessible via APIs) is Turing Complete, or even that the training mechanism used is Turing Complete. The proof in that paper only shows that for every TM there exists a corresponding Transformer ANN that produces the same output for the same input. That doesn't mean you can train this ANN based on backprop/gradient descent. Even more, it definitely doesn't mean GPT-3 itself can perform any computation, in the sense that my CPU can be programmed to, or produce any program in the sense that a C compiler can.

Note that even the universal function approximator result works the same way - it shows that for any (continuous and differentiable in at least one point) function there exists an ANN with certain properties that approximates it to arbitrary precision [1]. This doesn't mean that such an ANN can actually be constructed using backpropagation or other known training methods, from any input.

It also means that there isn't necessarily any ANN that can arbitrarily approximate a non-continuous function, such as tan(x) or f(x) = {1 for x >= 0, 0 for x [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.03429.pdf

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theore...

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