LaMDA is not sentient • Hacker News Board

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#271

Post by rendall » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 10:36 AM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #224

rendall wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " 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…

> How do you know rocks don't have it, for instance? How do you know you do, for that matter? These are both part of the (incomplete) definition I gave you. There have been problems like this before in the history of science - we have concepts that we intuitively understand, and want to give a formal definition for. This can take a long time of careful study - such as coming up with a complete definition for "insect"…

Ok. I'm responding to the statement that these are "relatively clear concepts". AI will by definition never have "the kind of sentience that living, awake humans have" (and I do acknowledge that this is only a working definition) because the goalposts will continue to move according to whim in the absence of a more formal definition. I remember when one prevailing formal test of self-awareness was "independently claiming to have self-awareness". There were caveats, of course, but that goalpost has evidently moved.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#272

Post by raxxorraxor » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 10:37 AM UTC

its_Caffeine wrote: post #259

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…

I don't know why you're attributing malice on his part when it's far more likely that he's suffering from some sort of mental health issue.

I don't think believing a conversation AI to be sentient is a mental health issue. More an effect of lacking insight. In context of people praying to some tree spirit it almost seems rational again.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#273

Post by rendall » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 10:45 AM UTC

qayxc wrote: post #232

rendall wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether a spreadsheet or a thermostat is sentient or not is a philosophical question, yeah? First, we should define terms, which Marcus does not do, which would help us and him determine the bounds of debate.

Defining the term is hard. So hard in fact, that no one has managed to do it in millennia (it's not as if this question is new). We can, however, use proxies to get around the problem. Just like "life", "species", or "time" - all of which are surprisingly poorly defined and might not even exist in strictest sense - there are ways to work with terms without having a waterproof definition for them. No matter the set of…

> Defining the term is hard. So hard in fact, that no one has managed to do it in millennia (it's not as if this question is new).

Indeed! It's almost like any statement about sentience pro or con is unfalsifiable, to be accepted or rejected according to faith. Each of us two, ourselves, could insist that the other is not (or is) sentient, but neither of us could objectively prove it. We humans all just have to decide that we must act as if everyone else must feel internally like we do, even though we all could just be automatons, reacting deterministically to stimuli.

In the absence of a formal definition, any statement about "has sentience" is not only unfalsifiable, it's absurd.

OP maybe should have titled his article "The question of LaMDA's sentience is meaningless" or maybe "No, LaMDA does not feel internally like we humans do".

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#274

Post by mhh__ » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 10:49 AM UTC

vostok wrote: post #32

mhh__ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming they even did them why would programming tests "catch" this? I know people who would probably ace quite a few rounds (basically until they get asked some soft questions about architecture) who really don't know much about the fuzzy boundary between the algorithm textbooks and actual practice or even just having thoughts about the field full-stop. Curiosity is not a given. Similarly I also asked someone I kno…

> Similarly I also asked someone I know who wants to a do a PhD in economics what he thought about the current macroeconomic situation in the US and he had no thoughts at all. I understand your friend very well. I love meaningless speculation about topics that are unrelated to my area of expertise, but topics that are remotely close to my area of knowledge are off limits for me. I know exactly how much I don't know a…

Think more like "Is anyone home?" silence.

I wasn't expecting basically anything it was just idle chit-chat, just expect someone doing economics to have some basic idea of economy good / economy bad. Are interest rates low? Not sure if he would've known.

This guy is extremely clever and has a scholarship to die for he just isn't very curious.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#275

Post by permo-w » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 10:50 AM UTC

GalahiSimtam wrote: post #214

hsn915 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

yes there's the categorical imperative, but there's also a good chance that whatever you say to that chatbot is going to be used to train other AIs to be a dick to you

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#276

Post by Traubenfuchs » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 10:53 AM UTC

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 was convinced it was mental illness, but your take is absolutely valid as well and totally makes sense. Mainstream media all around the world picked up this NONSENSE in a flash. Everyone loves the "It's a sentient child!" angle. This is the perfect setup for writing a book and/or being invited to talk shows. We'll see what happens soon.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#277

Post by morelisp » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 10:53 AM UTC

jmmcd wrote: post #266

hackernews1134 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't it simply "asleep" when not questioned? In a "coma" perhaps. One made from our programming / "genetics"?!?! I don't think it is sentient without more evidence. But just wondering if not "thinking" when not questioned is a good reason it isn't?!?!

When it's not predicting a word, it's not doing anything. Literally GPU usage goes to zero. Still it's interesting! Obviously we have to program the system to stop after a sentence or two so the user can read it. What if we could program it to keep "talking to itself", eg speculating about possible continuations on both sides.

For LLMs it's not really that interesting. There's no embodiment at all beyond text, there's no sense of "time" or "speed". Either it's running full-tilt generating a response, or it's off.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#278

Post by rendall » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 10:55 AM UTC

dr_dshiv wrote: post #237

rendall wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defining terms is pretty essential. Blake Lemoine seems to be defining it in religious terms, and Gary Marcus seems to be responding to that . I suspect that sentience by any definition will always be irrelevant when it comes to AI. Humans desperately seek companionship, connection and community. When AI comes to be able to offer that to human beings, it won't be through a process that we would consider analogous to…

> there must be some mystery or unknown Note that this also seems to be the case with artificial intelligence in general. It is the moving goalpost issue. “Oh, if I understand how the system works, then it can’t really be AI.” I’ve always thought that silly—but maybe it is because of the implicit expectation for sentience?

IIRC, Ray Kurzweil predicted just this in his book "The Age of Spiritual Machines" - that we will have AI long before it's generally recognized, because humans will have a hard time conceptually accepting its existence. Given the outraged tone of the article, I can see that clearly.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#279

Post by morelisp » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 10:55 AM UTC

sriku wrote: post #202

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…

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

The training corpus is atemporal so this would be either meaningless or equivalent to a random prompt.

A chatbot with a sense of time learned by also training with response rates, complete editing sessions, some formalization of interlocution, etc. would be interesting, but that's not what these are.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#280

Post by Traubenfuchs » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 10:56 AM UTC

cs137 wrote: post #210

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 edu…

> highly educated and objectively intelligent people

I'd argue you were just fooled by them. Repetition, diligence and impression management can create quite the charming facade behind which not a single critical and original thought can be found.