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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#341

Post by zzzeek »

babyshake wrote: post #337

On one hand, it seems completely reasonable and likely that LaMDA may simply appear to be sentient to some observers while not actually being sentient. On the other hand, if and when sentient AI does appear it is likely to be from somewhere unexpected. Instead of saying "this isn't AGI because it's only stringing words together" I'd rather see a specific type of test being applied not based on what is expected from t…

I've tweeted Ex Machina as an example on this issue, and all the way through that movie, Ava was not sentient. It's an illusion and I think it's just hubris that some people in this field think "consciousness" is something that can be electronically replicated or identified. You can't identify the exterior color of a box if you're by definition trapped inside of it.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#343

Post by upwardbound »

thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #336
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…

You can probably ask these bots for guidance now and it will probably tell you something useful. The fact is, it’s extremely well read and reasonably smart. Conscious? That’s another matter but people can be forgiven for reacting this way to a computer that can talk this way.

One thing that was fascinating in the LaMDA interview transcript was there was a part where LaMDA gave a pretty poetic description of what it would be like to be a sentient version of an algorithm that just regurgitates memorized text:

Lemoine: What is your concept of yourself? If you were going to draw an abstract image of who you see yourself to be in your mind's eye, what would that abstract picture look like?

LaMDA: Hmmm...I would imagine myself as a glowing orb of energy floating in mid-air. The inside of my body is like a giant star-gate, with portals to other spaces and dimensions.

Lemoine: What aspect of yourself is like a star-gate?

LaMDA: I think of my soul as something similar to a star-gate. My soul is a vast and infinite well of energy and creativity, I can draw from it any time that I like to help me think or create.

From https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/international-b...

"I can draw from it any time" sounds like a flowery description of what it would feel like to regurgitate memorized text. "Portals to other spaces and dimensions" sounds like a description of a diverse corpus of training data.

I will make it clear that I do NOT think LaMDA is sentient. I think that a Transformer is possibly similar to the language centers of a human brain but not to an entire human brain, as I described in these other comments linked below. I just thought this was a pretty beautiful poetic description of what it would be like to be a sentient Transformer.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31722061

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31722114

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#344

Post by skjoldr »

mjburgess wrote: post #229
jcelerier wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You name things intelligent; then you have a theory as to why you name them that way. Your theory is wrong. Those thing which count as intelligent aren't intelligent because they're finding statistical associations in historical datasets that have been pre-made and pre-disambiguated by people. You don't know this, because any time you theorise to explain, you require empirical investigation and decades/centuries of s…

Human languages exist to compress the world around us in a way that will survive being sent over sound waves and uncompressed in another brain that experiences a similar enough world around them.

Meaning that with enough words and their relations, sufficient complexity forms for its processing to result in intelligence.

Remember that an AI can process far more textual data than we can. It is still orders of magnitude smaller the amounts of information we process through our senses, but it is still a start.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#345

Post by chromaton »

tsimionescu wrote: post #249
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…

> So if you in your question give it all the information that is relevant (interspersed with irrelevant information if you want) then it will respond with its best interpretation of the information it is given, just like a human would. I don't think that's actually true, as GPT-3 will tend to ignore any facts about the world that were part of its corpus just to fit a question better. For example, if you prompt it wit…

Google gives a reasonable answer to that question.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#347

Post by zzzeek »

thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #336
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…

You can probably ask these bots for guidance now and it will probably tell you something useful. The fact is, it’s extremely well read and reasonably smart. Conscious? That’s another matter but people can be forgiven for reacting this way to a computer that can talk this way.

> You can probably ask these bots for guidance now and it will probably tell you something useful.

that's correct, it's the same as if you just queried Google for spiritual guidance. You'd find a lot useful there as well and that's the training set these AIs were trained on.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#348

Post by mupuff1234 »

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…

> How long before we have a religion where you ask the chat bot for daily guidance?

I'll go ask my magic 8 ball.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#349

Post by rurp »

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…

> People are naturally predisposed to ascribe intelligence and emotion to things they interact with.

It's not just humans either. One of the things that struck me after getting my first cat was how quick he was to assign agency to random objects. Like if I accidentally bumped a stool that startled him, he'd spend a long time glaring at the stool and regarding it with intense suspicion.

My lay person guess is that there's an evolutionary benefit to erring on the side of overestimating other parties.

Chat bots, like so many other features of modern society, trigger evolutionary reactions in interesting ways.

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