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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#481

Post by maxwell_smart »

bricemo wrote: post #431
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 lifel…

On the flip side, I remember reading a story of a parent listening to their child bark orders at Siri/Alexa, and thinking that even though there's no need for politeness, they felt that maybe they should teach their child to treat it kindly and politely for the sake of the child's emotional development in terms of empathy.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#482

Post by ranit »

bee_rider wrote: post #467
ranit wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps it is time to claim fait accompli with regard to the Turing test and now train models to re-assure us, when asked, that they are just a sophisticated chatbot. Good luck convincing bad actors to follow this rule.

We'll definitely see free-to-play lootbox games where you have a % chance of getting your AI chatbot another day of "life."

I'm not talking about games. Imagine this technology being used by an autocratic state.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#483

Post by hatsunearu »

chc wrote: post #38
crocowhile wrote: post #15

"Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent.1 All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language." This is what we, humans, do too when we talk. All these people talk about intelligence in such tautological terms... It's discouraging. We simply do not know if a machine is self-aware and most likely we will never will. Self-awareness is the ultimate subj…

That is what we do when we talk, but that is not all we do when we talk. In composing this comment, I am not just stringing together words to create what I think constitutes a maximally appealing response to your comment. I am trying to convey an idea that I believe with the goal of helping others to understand something. These language AIs do not have the capability of believing anything and do not have any goal but…

The magic word is theory of mind. there was some stuff in lambda that seemed like it had some sense of theory of mind: knowing, without explicitly being told, what the human speaker was thinking based on conversations with one another.

like, if you and I chatted for 15 minutes intensely, i'd be pretty confident about what i think what you think of me (and vice versa for you) and if we're going really deep, if i'm trying to be really smart, I could also try to engineer what you think of me (which honestly is a daily occurrence when you are trying to make friends with someone, change someone's opinion, despite sounding devious)...

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#484

Post by acoard »

BobbyJo wrote: post #465
strix_varius wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think many of us, including Google, are guilty of shooting the messenger here. Let's cut Lemoine some slack.. he is presenting an opinion that will become more prevailant as these models get more sophisticated. I think many of us are astounded (myself included) that a senior engineer on Google's "Responsible Artificial Intelligence" team would interpret LaMDA's most-probable-string-of-text-given-my-training-corpu…

The fundamental problem is there is nothing in science that tells us that isn't consciousness. Just because the model is simpler than a human brain doesn't mean it isn't conscious. If you accept that animals are conscious, though less-so than humans, then you must also accept that this model is possibly conscious ina similar way. Maybe there is a biological element to consciousness, but many models posit that conscio…

Lemoine admits the model will say it is not conscience if prompted to. It'll also say it is conscience if prompted to. Lemoine says this is because it is a "people pleaser"[0], but to me that's begging the question (i.e. assuming the conclusion as a premise). It also seems plausible that the "AI" is just like a run-of-the-mill string-completing chatbot instead of being a people pleaser. Both are alternative explanations of the same phenomena, but one assumes it's conscious, and by doing so isn't making a compelling argument.

[0] https://twitter.com/cajundiscordian/status/15357826682476462...

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#485

Post by morelisp »

bricemo wrote: post #431
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 lifel…

> The danger is from people’s reactions to the AI’s.

If only Google hadn't fired the AI ethicists who were actually competent enough to try to explain this part of it.

https://twitter.com/mmitchell_ai/status/1535775360901451776

Well, that's less exciting than "we got sentience!" and less profitable than "robot friends waiting now, only 99c/min", so here we are.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#486

Post by vineyardmike »

mdp2021 wrote: post #445
bricemo wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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 lifel…

> It would be wise for technologists to pause and take this human reaction seriously It would be wise for /policymakers/ to pause and take this human reaction seriously... Education!... Lucidity in the population... You are reminding of the reactions from a YT-type crowd, "Do not hurt the robot!"; nearby a member notes "is that the profile of a senior FAANG engineer?"... The elephant in the room is flashing: we must…

Hard disagree. It’s convenient to say people are too dumb but beyond the condescending nature of it, it’s a bad take.

Even people who absolutely are educated and know better - senior google AI researchers - are sympathetic.

People say thank you to Alexa even though no one is convinced Alexa is a person.

The issue isn’t lack of awareness that it isn’t a person, it’s the silly little monkey brains we have that tells us that anything that is like a person should be treated like one even if we know it’s not. It’s like people who look at faces in clouds. No one thinks the clouds are people.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#487

Post by matthews2 »

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?

TempleOS had a "talk to God" feature that its developer frequently used on live streams, though it was just a random number generator and not any kind of artificial intelligence.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#488

Post by adwn »

Aqueous wrote: post #469
bricemo wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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 lifel…

This is part of why I think a ban on humanoid and even animal-like robots should be considered. Our intuitions are leading us astray here and we are going to start extending rights to things that don’t have subjective experience, but may insist to us that they do. It’s going to create intense confusion and an extremely inefficient bureaucracy that will stifle innovation.

> This is part of why I think a ban on humanoid and even animal-like robots should be considered. [...] It’s going to create intense confusion and an extremely inefficient bureaucracy that will stifle innovation.

So you want introduce laws and regulations that stifle innovation in order to prevent inefficient bureaucracies that stifle innovation?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#489

Post by lumost »

acid__ wrote: post #425
lumost wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It's partially the price point which has lead me to believe that Replika may not be being 100% truthful. There have been text based answering services for decades charging 10 cents to respond to a text message. While I don't doubt the majority is ML driven, I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few human responses.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#490

Post by int_19h »

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…

The real question is, what even is sentience? The only real certainty about it is that one is sentient oneself - and that's because "I'm sentient" is taken as an axiom! From there, you basically have two approaches: either try to somehow define the specifics of sentience, or give up and say that anything that behaves as a sentient entity is one. The latter is the premise of the Turing test. The former all try to decompose one's sentience into bits that can be translated to other entities - but doing so "from within" produces criteria that are tautological or circular.

I strongly suspect that notions such as sentience and self-awareness don't have a meaningful physical definition, but are necessary for us to function, because they're the mental glue that makes thinking about "I" possible at all - which is broadly advantageous for survival. But why should a different mind necessarily need the same kind of glue to function as a whole? And how do we even know if it's the same or not without being able to observe it from the perspective of that other mind (since that's how we observe our own sentience, that's necessary to make accurate comparisons)?

I furthermore suspect that we refuse to embrace these notions because our sense of identity - of self - is, by necessity, so strong that any premise that undermines it is strongly disadvantaged from the get-go. Basically, we do not like to even contemplate the notion that "I am not one indivisible whole", even if it might be closer to how our mind actually operates on the physical level.

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