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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#421

Post by ted_dunning »

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…

Well, we already have a society where a large chunk of the population asks a bag of rocks, or read a horoscope or pray to a faded picture for guidance so it seems like it wouldn't take long before people listen to chatbots each morning as they plan their day.

At least with the chatbot, the guidance they get will be (somewhat) more observable.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#422

Post by babyshake »

zzzeek wrote: post #341
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.

Strange...I thought it was pretty clear by the end (without going into spoilers) that Ava is sentient. Interesting that there is another interpretation of what happened.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#423

Post by treesrule »

nsxwolf wrote: post #334

I detect a weird and concerning undercurrent of palpable anger from people in these discussions. What is it about misidentifying sentience that's causing such ire?

This sentence translates to "lol u mad bro"

That is I think you are trying to defend someone indefensible position (a google engineer taking a kinda normal ai chatbot conversation and claiming that the AI is alive) by ignoring the core issue and focusing on instead an ansilary issue. I find the misdirection uncompelling. I obviously could be wrong here and you could genuinely be wondering why this person would be mad.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#424

Post by bick_nyers »

Animats wrote: post #394

The real question: How much of human behavior is not sentient? What this demonstrates is that much of human intelligence is not as special as we thought. Aristotle claimed that humans were intelligent because they could do arithmetic. Now we know how few gates it takes to do arithmetic. Then checkers. Then chess. Then go. Then poker. Now chatting. As I point out occasionally, AI still sucks at animal-level common sen…

I think there is a non-zero chance that AI as it stands today actually doesn't suck at animal-level common sense, it's just that we don't have a realistic enough simulation environment built that it can train on.

While at first glance it may appear that humans learn much better than AI in unstructured environments, I would argue that from the very moment a human is born, it is in a very highly structured environment provided by their parents and modern society.

If you made some baby robots and gave them human parents, would they be much better suited for driving a car after 16 years?

Of course I am hand waving away a lot of technical complexity here, but perhaps the road to artificial general intelligence... is an artificial general simulation?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#425

Post by acid__ »

lumost wrote: post #410
acid__ wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/replika/comments/r5t0wk/so_you_thin.…

I have been suspicious that services like Replika use an army of chatters in the background to respond to certain questions.

They’re pretty clear that this is not the case. However, that doesn’t stop our imaginations going wild as per the GP’s point. It’s impressive how good these bots are compared to the state of the art 10 years ago.

https://help.replika.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001070971-Is-t...

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#426

Post by candlemas »

greiskul wrote: post #417
candlemas wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A perfect simulation of a human run on a computer would exist only in the minds of the people doing the simulation. On the computer it would be bits of data without any intrinsic meaning that is being processed like any other data. So no, I don't think it would be conscious unless a computer becomes conscious whenever it is running.

What if we gave it a robot body, with cameras and sensors? What if we made this robot body with biotechnology, so the only eletronic parts were the brain? And we didn't tell it that it was a robot. Will you be the one that will go tell them they are not concious? Please be careful, they will probably become very upset at you. People tend to do that.

That wouldn't change a thing. A simulation is not the thing being simulated, it is data being processed and people agreeing to interpret that data in a certain way. If somebody coded a perfect simulation of a fire their computer would not burn down.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#427

Post by qgin »

Not being glib, but I think we’re going to keep moving the goalpost until humans don’t even qualify as being sentient. And maybe that’s actually the real truth we learn from all this.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#428

Post by shagie »

upwardbound wrote: post #405
Animats wrote: post #394

The real question: How much of human behavior is not sentient? What this demonstrates is that much of human intelligence is not as special as we thought. Aristotle claimed that humans were intelligent because they could do arithmetic. Now we know how few gates it takes to do arithmetic. Then checkers. Then chess. Then go. Then poker. Now chatting. As I point out occasionally, AI still sucks at animal-level common sen…

A related thought experiment has to do with the possibility of someday using cyborg technology as a way to stave off dementia and Alzheimer's. If it turns out that you could replace the brain's long-term memory database with a computer database without losing any sentience, that would allow people to avoid the tragedy of losing their memories. This would require that the brain's database section is not a sentient par…

I'm not sure if this is in the Love Death and Robots version of Zima Blue - but it was part of the written story. The clips from people reviewing the LD&R version of it always concentrate on Zima and its pursuit of the color. There's an entire second story about the reporter that is intertwined with Zima.

> ‘But there isn’t anything natural about being alive a thousand years after I was born,’ I said. ‘My organic memory reached saturation point about seven hundred years ago. My head’s like a house with too much furniture. Move something in, you have to move something out.’

> ‘Let’s go back to the wine for a moment,’ Zima said. ‘Normally, you’d have relied on the advice of the AM, wouldn’t you?’

> I shrugged. ‘Yes.’

> ‘Would the AM always suggest one of the two possibilities? Always red wine, or always white wine, for instance?’

> ‘It’s not that simplistic,’ I said. ‘If I had a strong preference for one over the other, then yes, the AM would always recommend one wine over the other. But I don’t. I like red wine sometimes and white wine other times. Sometimes I don’t want any kind of wine.’ I hoped my frustration wasn’t obvious. But after the elaborate charade with the blue card, the robot and the conveyor, the last thing I wanted to be discussing with Zima was my own imperfect recall.

There's another page of the story that starts out with "As for me . . ." and happens several couple of decades later as the reporter reflects.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#429

Post by alkonaut »

Technologically it’s not sentient. Sociologically it’s sentient enough to evoke real feelings in people at least some of the time. That’s more interesting and relevant at this point. What are the consequences of having non-sentient AIs that people have real feelings for?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#430

Post by mdp2021 »

robbomacrae wrote: post #396

Of course it is not. But there's a bigger issue here. Having read the transcript it's clear we have reached the point where we have models that can fool the average person. Sure, a minority of us know it is simply maths and vast amounts of training data... but I can also see why others will be convinced by it. I think many of us, including Google, are guilty of shooting the messenger here. Let's cut Lemoine some slac…

> he is presenting an opinion that will become more prevailant

I see little difference to "Einstein and moral relativity" (actual social issue at the time). A mistake easy to avoid even for a layman, yet occurring, out of differently instanced perversion.

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