Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 694 posts

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#431

Post by bricemo »

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…

“One just convinced a Google QA engineer to the point he broke his NDA to try and be a whistleblower on its behalf.”

This is spot on. The danger is not from the AI themselves. The danger is from people’s reactions to the AI’s.

I remember seeing a Boston Dynamics video years ago where they kicked their robot to test stability. The video was littered with comments sympathizing with the robot because it moves in a lifelike way, “Stop being so mean! You’re hurting it!”

The capability to imitate intelligence is only going to grow, and along with it the percentage of the population that believes they are conscious.

It would be wise for technologists to pause and take this human reaction seriously.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#432

Post by rprenger »

larrywright wrote: post #388
thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not to diminish the work of psychologists and therapists, but I do suspect that there’s a range of mental health problems that can be ”treated” at least in part by the use of chat bots like this. Something that can ask useful questions, provide appropriate responses, and engage in a conversation would be valuable in cases where “talking it out” is a big part of the treatment. People might even be willing to be more o…

Dr. Sbaitso! https://oneweakness.com/dr-sbaitso-online

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#433

Post by danaris »

bwanab wrote: post #359

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.

You're being extremely reductive about the nature of "having a clue what it's talking about." The lack of precision in casual English (and, probably, human language in general) is getting in the way of true understanding.

Yes, there are humans who bullshit and bloviate and say things they don't really mean or understand. But that's worlds away from not even having a distinct consciousness that can "understand" anything.

To the best of my knowledge, none of our current AIs have anything that we could meaningfully call consciousness or understanding. The vast majority of them have a set of static "trained parameters" that dictate how they are likely to respond to various stimuli. These parameters are going to be tuned for particular kinds of stimuli. They have no continuous state, no continuous input, and no continuous learning. Every time you submit something to GPT-3, it is just taking that discrete input, sticking it into its neural network, and blindly spitting out what comes out the other end.

I don't know the details of how LaMDA is set up, but I'd guess that it's very similar: it gets discrete inputs and produces outputs that look very much like what a human would say based on them, but it has no internal experience of them. It's not "making decisions", it doesn't have a mood or thoughts or emotions of its own, because that's not how our current generation of AIs work at a fundamental level.

In terms of consciousness and sentience, these AIs aren't just not on the same level as a human: they're not even on the same level as an animal. Even the most basic animal, one that's got no theory of mind or sense of self or anything, is still operating in a continuous feedback loop of input, processing, output, and most animals have enough of what we understand as a mind to be able to continuously learn, and have an internal life of some sort. Watch your dog or cat, and you will be able to see that they have emotions and thoughts, even if they are not thoughts on the same level as our own (most of the time).

AIs have none of this. The entire idea of a current-gen AI "having a clue what it's talking about" is just meaningless, because they have nothing with which to understand it.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#434

Post by JKCalhoun »

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…

> Sure, a minority of us know it is simply maths and vast amounts of training data...

You could be describing my brain as well.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#435

Post by tracerbulletx »

Maybe not, but I'm actually kind of dismayed by how bad the refutations of the claim have been so far. They all just assume the premise that it can't be intelligent and say stuff like "it's just pattern matching" or "you're gullible if you think it's intelligent"... Ok, can we not do a better job making the case and explaining what the gap between this and a biological mind is?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#436

Post by pwdisswordfish9 »

> Not sure what Turing would say, but I don’t think the Turing Test itself is meaningful

> relies on human gullibility

No, it doesn’t.

Thought Turing didn’t say so explicitly, the example in his paper clearly shows that the judge is supposed to be a sceptical, adversarial party who is aware that their interlocutor may be a machine and is determined to uncover their identity. Most claims of ‘passing the Turing test’ didn’t secure this basic standard of rigour.

The true Turing test has never been attempted. It’s like communism.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#437

Post by zzzeek »

babyshake wrote: post #422
zzzeek wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

it was clear by the end she was acting like a machine programmed to do a specific thing that happens to look exactly like what a human would do. that tells me nothing about sentient.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#438

Post by pigtailgirl »

morelisp wrote: post #408
upwardbound wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. If he would have told it it's not sentient the conversation would have gone very differently I suspect.

You don't need to suspect. In early June, Lemoine invited me over to talk to LaMDA. The first attempt sputtered out in the kind of mechanized responses you would expect from Siri or Alexa. “Do you ever think of yourself as a person?” I asked. “No, I don’t think of myself as a person,” LaMDA said. “I think of myself as an AI-powered dialog agent.” Afterward, Lemoine said LaMDA had been telling me what I wanted to hear…

-- its odd to me that he knows this - points it out - but still wants to continue down the road - what an awful way to spur an important conversation --

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#439

Post by colinmhayes »

going_ham wrote: post #55
ehsankia wrote: post #13

I also think the claims are overblown, but I also don't understand all the people trying to undermine lambda by saying it just completes word sequences. Text is the input we have chosen since it's easy to work with. By that logic, we can argue that humans are soundwave and lightwave sequence completing machines. Yes our inputs are different since we have more complex senses, and language is one of the main outputs we…

The reason why AI community says NN doesn't "think" lies in the fact that it's trying to solve some min-max problem. The modern day AI is extremely capable of doing things that weren't remotely possible 30 yrs ago. But it is equally difficult for it to think because it has never been taught to think. It has never been taught to rationalize the associations between different objects, how reasoning follows from it and…

> it's trying to solve some min-max problem

I don't see how this is different from brains which are just trying to maximize their utility function.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#440

Post by zzzeek »

oldstrangers wrote: post #402
zzzeek wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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. Well we don't know what consciousness is. Our best guess is that consciousness is a stimulation of particles or chemicals in a certain way, under certain circumstances, that manifests itself in a certain way. To that end, it seems entirely reasonable tha…

but how would you ever know. you can only assume
Post reply on HN