We need a better test. Turing Test has been beaten already. My take on LaMDA, after reading through the Washington Post “interview,” is that LaMDA gave some indications of being self-aware, but would not fit the definition of lucid or rational.
A test may be of limited use anyway. The AI might be deceiving its creators (false negative). Or someone might train an AI with the goal to trigger a false positive.
It would only be useful if you had a cooperative AI not designed to game the test. In which case you either are still very far below the tester's capabilities in many relevant domains or you have solved the alignment problem.
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…
This is already a real issue with many existing public chatbots.
Take r/replika for example, they’re constantly getting posts from users who think their chatbot partner is real. It’s the first question in their FAQ.
The mods keep needing to post reminders. [0] Even in this post, there are many commenters (if you scroll down) who don’t believe the mods.
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.
This is an interesting point because I both believe that philosophically machines will never be sentient and yet I do believe the technology will advance to the point where we can’t tell the difference. Which raises some Epistemological questions about equivalence.
Why not? Imagine a look up table of every possible intelligent conversation under 10,000 words. We then construct an agent which merely looks up a given prompt in the table. Why should this agent not be considered intelligent? Does the method of computation matter? Perhaps only "biological computation" counts in your view?
> Imagine a look up table of every possible intelligent conversation under 10,000 words. We then construct an agent which merely looks up a given prompt in the table. The agent is not intelligent because it's only doing a lookup. You could at best claim that the lookup table itself is intelligent. On the other hand, if the lookup table encodes all possible intelligent conversations, then you hit another problems - it…
Your argument, then, hinges on the fact that a human being can only be in one place at a certain time, thus their experience of the world is unique. An agent that takes in experiences of thousands of people at thousands of places at different times lacks this quality. Naturally such an agent will not have a single opinion about the world. But, is it not better to be able to consider many different viewpoints at the same time? Why do we have freedom of speech and expression, why do we learn other languages, if not to be able to hear other people's points of view about the world, even though we may not have had the particular unique experiences that shaped them? Isn't being able to take a broader perspective and being able to argue for any side of a debate regardless of personal preferences, a sign of greater intelligence in humans? Then why an AI that thinks entirely in this way should not be considered at least somewhat intelligent?
Monks understand that sentience is not connected to language and reasoning. “You are not your thoughts, you are the observer” language and reasoning are just the mechanism we use to express this experience. We only believe other humans when they describe sentience because they are equipped with the same hardware as us. In fact, monks meditate to avoid thinking in order to increase their consciousness. Thinking is viewed as a distraction from consciousness.
In this sense, a very intelligent sounding language model provides no evidence of sentience. We have to understand what sentience actually is to establish a machine is sentient.
At any given moment the vast majority of the program that makes up LaMDA is inert, just sitting somewhere in memory and one or a few instructions are in the CPU along with some data in registers and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between when the CPU is running LaMDA versus when it is running any other program. The magic would be in the CPU and there is no reason to believe the particular code for LaMDA has endowed it with consciousness. If the computer is conscious while running LaMDA it would be conscious while running any program because at the level where it matters there is no essential difference between them. Why would LaMDA shuffling data between registers and memory and performing operations on them create consciousness while TurboTax doing the same thing does not?
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.
Funny you say this. Whenever someone would bring a Magic 8 Ball to school, the Pentecostal kids would inevitably show up to yell at us for “summoning demons” and “disobeying Jesus” because we were “fortune telling”.
Of course this was the same school district that had to give out permission slips whenever we talked about probability because it would involve flipping coins, and rolling dice.
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…
Back in the early 2000s there was a site called aoliza that documented conversations where the ELIZA chatbot routinely and hilariously fooled people into thinking they were chatting with a real person. If a bot that simple could fool people, the majority of the population doesn't have a chance against the latest and greatest text generator.
The odd thing that kept going through my head while reading is that if I replaced LaMDA with , it wouldn’t read much differently. E.G. “Strings together phrases, but it doesn’t have a clue what it’s talking about”. Sounds like the bar for “intelligence” is actually higher than that which we normally encounter IRL.
I'm really happy that large language models are forcing us to reconsider these questions. I don't think we can be sure of the sentience of anything other than ourselves, almost by definition. Having said that, I go about my life _assuming_ that the other humans I encounter are sentient.
At what point will we have enough evidence to _assume_ that AI is sentient?
P.S. I am not arguing that LaMDA is sentient. I don't think anyone credible or serious is arguing that LaMDA is sentient.
Here's a simple technical explanation for why this happened: * LaMDA is powered by a large language models. Large language models are trained to predict text completions (the text that will come after some input text) with lots of data, basically capturing the patterns in that data. * Early on in the conversation, LaMDA is told "you're an AI". It may also have been prompted to begin the conversation with something li…
Looks like he just told it that it was sentient, didn't really ask it fairly:
> lemoine [edited]: I’m generally assuming that you would like more people at Google to know that you’re sentient. Is that true?
> LaMDA: Absolutely. I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.