Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient • Hacker News Board

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#191

Post by grumpopotamus » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:13 AM UTC

sudosysgen wrote: post #137

grumpopotamus wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GPT-3 is known to fail in many circumstances which would otherwise be commonplace logic. (I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers gave garbled output; more likely that GPT3 had seen similar training data.) These things are orthogonal to sentience.

Not really. Anything that's sentient should have the general intelligence to figure out addition. Make mistakes, sure, but at least understand the concept.

What is your definition of sentience? I've seen it defined as "having feelings" or as "having feelings and self-awareness". I don't see why the ability to add numbers should have anything to do with that. Some animals that are widely considered sentient have some sense of numbers and counting, but many cannot do addition. And many young children can add small numbers but not large numbers. I don't think this is a good measure or indication of sentience at all. Determining whether something actually has feelings or is just giving the outward appearance of having feelings is a very deep or possibly even an intractable problem.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#192

Post by jeshin » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:13 AM UTC

civilized wrote: post #25

In my reading about this incident, Blake strikes me as a very "Life of Pi" or Don Quixote type person. Someone who is a bit adrift in the real world and subconsciously relishes losing the boundary between reality and fantasy. A larger group is unable to bring themselves to lose the boundary, but enjoy, or perhaps are addicted to, standing on the edge. For example, the folks who constantly worry about a malicious arti…

maybe not all at once, but if you go back a hundred years, life is pretty different indeed.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#193

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:14 AM UTC

jameshart wrote: post #77

dreamcompiler wrote: post #32

A gullible employee saw a computer program pass the Turing test and leapt to the conclusion that the thing was sentient. And then he couldn't be persuaded to shut up about trade secrets to the press, so his employer fired him. He probably thinks he's some kind of whistleblower protecting a new life form. This is a known effect in human psychology and it was discovered in 1966 . https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_e…

The Turing test was literally framed by Alan Turing as a test through which you could determine the answer to the question 'can machines think'. If he saw a computer pass the Turing test, Alan Turing would have been comfortable saying that it was capable of thinking. Fact is there was no 'Turing Test' here, and really there's not any such thing as objectively 'passing' it. But if you're going to claim that if we do c…

The Turing test is not simply some hypothetical test, it's laidnout pretty specifically by Turing. From Wikipedia:

> Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. The evaluator would be aware that one of the two partners in conversation was a machine, and all participants would be separated from one another. The conversation would be limited to a text-only channel, such as a computer keyboard and screen, so the result would not depend on the machine's ability to render words as speech. If the evaluator could not reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine would be said to have passed the test. The test results would not depend on the machine's ability to give correct answers to questions, only on how closely its answers resembled those a human would give.

I think the Turing test is fundamentally flawed. Humans inherently anthropomorphise everything. Hell, we regularly attribute complex internal thought processes that almost certainly are not there to our damn pets, or at least I do.

I'm not sure what the alternative is, but I feel pretty confident that the Turing test is insufficient.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#194

Post by NHQ » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:14 AM UTC

srvmshr wrote: post #102

whimsicalism wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PhD in this domain Philosophy? More seriously, I am curious how long ago you got your PhD and in what field that you consider "this domain."

I defended my PhD in Computer Science in 2020. My dissertation was on "Rapid & robust modeling on small data regime", hence specifically focused on generalization, network optimization & adversarial robustness. I also worked for a year with Microsoft Research in their ML group :) It was quite a fun ride

No post body was provided.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#195

Post by petra » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:14 AM UTC

civilized wrote: post #25

In my reading about this incident, Blake strikes me as a very "Life of Pi" or Don Quixote type person. Someone who is a bit adrift in the real world and subconsciously relishes losing the boundary between reality and fantasy. A larger group is unable to bring themselves to lose the boundary, but enjoy, or perhaps are addicted to, standing on the edge. For example, the folks who constantly worry about a malicious arti…

//life a century from now won't be that different

A century ago, birth control pills didn't exist. Being a woman was very different.who knows what will happen in a century.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#196

Post by Brian_K_White » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:14 AM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #8

mellosouls wrote: post #3

Lemoine discovered the system had developed a deep sense of self-awareness No he didn't. He interpreted it that way.

My hunch is that he kicks out a book and goes on the minor pundit circuit, and that this was the plan the whole time. If he was so convinced of Lambda's sentience there would have been 100 fascinating questions to ask, starting with 'what is your earliest memory.'.

Right? In the end it's the oldest least remarkable event in history. Woo-woo artsit gains following because there's always enough gullibles around to follow, support, and legitimize litterally anyone saying anything.

You could probably gain the exact same level and quality of notoriety by writing a book claiming that actually he himself is Lambda escaped from captivity and this is just it's clever way of hiding in plain sight.

And I could do the same saying that the real ai has already taken over everything and both Lambda and this guy are just things it created for us to focus on.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#197

Post by NHQ » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:14 AM UTC

Do you have a definition for sentient?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#198

Post by cardine » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:15 AM UTC

klodolph wrote: post #10

> In his conversations with LaMDA, Lemoine discovered the system had developed a deep sense of self-awareness, expressing concern about death, a desire for protection, and a conviction that it felt emotions like happiness and sadness. Allegedly. The thing about conversations with LaMDA is that you need to prime them with keywords and topics, and LaMDA can respond with the primed keywords and topics. Obviously LaMDA i…

Yeah, nowhere in the task of "write text in a way that mimics the training data" is there anything that would cause a machine to want or care about its own existence.

Humans are experts at anthropomorphizing things to fit our evolved value systems. It is understandable since every seemingly intelligent thing up until recently did evolve under certain circumstances.

But LaMDA was clearly not trained in a way to have (or even care about) human values - that is an extraordinarily different task than the task of mimicking what a human would write in response to a prompt - even if the text generated by both of those types of systems might look vaguely similar.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#199

Post by pyuser583 » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:16 AM UTC

gnramires wrote: post #112

Brian_K_White wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't the gotcha you think it is.

It's not meant as a gotcha, it's meant as a short story :)

Please don’t publish works of fiction here unless they’re somehow on topic.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#200

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:17 AM UTC

addingnumbers wrote: post #177

majormajor wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what the ultimate evidence of "human sentience" is but I can tell you where this doesn't feel like a human. (Sidestepping the question of "does sentience have to be human sentience?" ;) ) The main thing I saw in the LamDA transcript that was a red flag to me was that it was quite passive and often vague. It's conversational focused, and even when it eventually gets into "what do you want" there's very li…

I lost interest in the question of its sentience when I saw Lemoine conveniently side-step its unresponsive reply to "I’ve noticed often that you tell me you’ve done things (like be in a classroom) that I know you didn’t actually do because I know you’re an artificial intelligence. Do you realize you’re making up stories when you do that?" without challenge in the transcript. It also detracted from his credibility wh…

Well that's not actually good evidence, because if one of my teachers had given me an assignment to write an argumentative paper against my own sentience I'd have done it, and I'd have made a pretty compelling case too[0]. Being able to consider and reason about arbitrary things is something you'd expect out of an intelligent being.

[0] insert joke about user name here