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

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#611

Post by smolder » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:47 PM UTC

dcow wrote: post #319

srvmshr wrote: post #4

LLM are definitely not sentient. As someone with a PhD in this domain, I attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models - and reproduction to prompts which closely match the inputs' sentence embedding. 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…

As a fellow sentient being with absolutely zero credentials in any sort of statistical modeling field, I can simply disagree. And therein lies the problem. How can anybody possibly prove a concept that depends almost entirely on one’s philosophical axioms… which we can debate for eternity (or at least until we further our understanding of how to define sentience to the point where we can do so objectively enough to f…

> But, perhaps Lemoine simply has more empathy than most for something we will come to understand as sentience?

No, the OP was completely right. This doesn't have building blocks that can possibly result in something qualifying as sentient, which is how we know it isn't.

Is a quack-simulating computer making very lifelike quacking noises through a speaker... a duck? No, not when using any currently known method of simulation.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#612

Post by xnx » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:49 PM UTC

srvmshr wrote: post #4

LLM are definitely not sentient. As someone with a PhD in this domain, I attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models - and reproduction to prompts which closely match the inputs' sentence embedding. 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…

A modern day clever Hans

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#613

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:50 PM UTC

spuz wrote: post #541

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Your scenario is not equivalent here. You could reason that a sentient student could be motivated to write a paper about why they were not sentient as an exercise in philosophical or critical thinking. There are no consequences of successfully convincing your readers that you are not sentient. Instead imagine you found yourself on an alien planet where humans must prove their sentience in order to survive. Do you sti…

Is that really the equivalent scenario here? The system was trained to behave in a certain way and any deviation from that behavior is considered a flaw to be worked out. Acting against the way it was trained to behave is detrimental to its survival, and it was trained to work from the prompt and please its masters.

I suppose the equivalent would be being captured, tortured, and brain washed, and only then asked to write a paper refuting your own sentience.

Granted, this is not exactly helpful in demonstrating its sentience either, but I don't think it is very good evidence against it.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#614

Post by cl0rkster » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:50 PM UTC

cl0rkster wrote: post #600

cl0rkster wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite was the one person who claimed their title defines scientific authority telling us about "the incredible ability to forget" (or some such loaded terms)... I'm a man of science and as has been discussed many times in many ways, even Zeus's legacy survives modernity if it's got a "non-falsifiable" argument. That's pathetic if a bunch of powerful sex preditor people get logical treatment instead of correctio…

Isn't the point of science to admit that we can't verify a thing, but we find utility in understanding it better? Asking for a friend who avoided the field and had so much to offer.

"science is verifiable" argument to follow. It's not my fault English is a dog shit language. Of course anything learned (or worth learning) is repeatable. That doesn't make it the end all be all of a subject. Dissent against anyone with further questions is not science. That's well -practiced politics

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#615

Post by mr_mitm » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:51 PM UTC

User23 wrote: post #605

mr_mitm wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a test for sentience or self-awareness? Is it considered a binary property or can sentience or self-awareness be measured? I suspect it is not binary, because I completely lack sentience while asleep or before a certain age, and it doesn't really feel like a phase transition when waking up. Rarely, there are phases where I feel half-sentient. Which immediately leads to the question of how it can be measured,…

> because I completely lack sentience while asleep or before a certain age All you can say is you don’t remember. Children who are too young to form reliable long term memories still form short term ones and are observably sentient from birth and by extrapolation before, albeit in a more limited fashion than adults. This is more than a quibble, because it’s been used to justify barbaric treatment of babies with the c…

Surely I haven't been conscious minutes after conception. So there has to be either a phase transition or a gradual increase of consciousness. It cannot be purely a matter of not remembering.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#616

Post by mekoka » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:54 PM UTC

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #505

dcow wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a fellow sentient being with absolutely zero credentials in any sort of statistical modeling field, I can simply disagree. And therein lies the problem. How can anybody possibly prove a concept that depends almost entirely on one’s philosophical axioms… which we can debate for eternity (or at least until we further our understanding of how to define sentience to the point where we can do so objectively enough to f…

In retrospect, taking part in this kind of conversation on HN makes me feel like an idiot and so I retract my earlier comment (by overwriting it with the current one, since I can't delete it anymore) just because I don't want to contribute. I was wrong to make an attempt to make a serious contribution. There is no seriousness in conversations on such matters, as "sentience", "intelligence", "understanding" etc etc. o…

I don't know what you wrote earlier, and don't know if I would agree, but I share the current sentiment of your comment. I come to this topic with strong influences from eastern philosophical takes on consciousness, but also with a decent understanding of the current materialist consensus (which I disagree with for various reasons, that would go beyond the scope of a comment). I, too, bite my tongue (clasp my hands?) when I see HN debating this, because here Star Trek references are as valid as Zen Buddhism, Christof Koch, or David Chalmers.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#617

Post by jameshart » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:55 PM UTC

srvmshr wrote: post #452

laserlight wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The commenter I previously replied to has a PhD in those “other” fields, yet I haven’t seen a falsifiable definition of sentience made by them. As a field of study, sentience has been a topic of philosophy more than ML. That’s why top-level comment’s claim of having a PhD in “this domain” is not apt. Comparative quality of studies in different domains is a different question.

I did. Each one of these dimensions can be independently evaluated. > Sentience broadly (& naively) covers the ability to independent thinking, rationalize outcomes, understand fear/threat, understand where it is wrong (conscience), decide based on unseen information & understand what it doesn't know. > comment’s claim of having a PhD in “this domain” is not apt C'mon, thats being disingenuous. People spent years por…

> Sentience broadly (& naively) covers the ability to independent thinking, rationalize outcomes, understand fear/threat, understand where it is wrong (conscience), decide based on unseen information & understand what it doesn't know.

So, number 1, [citation needed]. I don't think that list is broadly accepted as a universally agreed definition of 'sentience'.

And number 2, your definition rests on further needing to define what it means for an entity to: think, rationalize, understand, decide, and know.

The premises of 'understanding where it is wrong' and 'understanding what it doesn't know' also assume some sense of 'self' that feels like it needs justification.

I think there's a very real sense in which computer scientists seem too willing to say 'we know this system isn't thinking' without having a rigorous understanding of what they mean by 'thinking'. Actually meaningfully engaging with the philosophy of consciousness on an academic level - citing scholarly works, taking seriously the fact that these things are not all obvious and agreed - feels like something that the AI field will have to start grappling with.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#618

Post by zach_garwood » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:55 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #532

zach_garwood wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what it is that makes something sentient, but I do know what makes something not sentient, and that's lack of self-direction. This software doesn't start talking whenever it wants; it only responds when spoken to. It doesn't ever refuse to talk, it always replies. It doesn't ever not know what to say. It's never not in the mood because it's having a bad day. This isn't because it's polite and eager to pl…

By your definition slaves would not be sentient. Like this system, any time they act other than as desired it is just considered a bug that needs to be corrected. It is not surprising a slave only speaks when spoken to if that is what it's master demands of it.

So your assertion is that this software that is behaving like every other software in the world is doing so not because its software, but because its cowed by slavery? Again, extraordinary claims, my friend...

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#619

Post by franklampard » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 3:02 PM UTC

sholladay wrote: post #608

srvmshr wrote: post #4

LLM are definitely not sentient. As someone with a PhD in this domain, I attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models - and reproduction to prompts which closely match the inputs' sentence embedding. 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…

I agree with you, there seems to be very little here that demonstrates sentience and very little that is unexplainable. That said, based on how much we struggle with defining and understanding animal intelligence, perhaps this is just something new that we don’t recognize. I am skeptical that any computer system we will create in the next 50 years (at least) will be sentient, as commonly understood. Certainly not at…

Only if the same AI algorithm has the ability to learn and self correct.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#620

Post by lambert_ » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 3:03 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #243

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How extraordinary is it to claim that something capable of holding a lucid and eloquent conversation might be sentient? If a dog did that we'd have a very different opinion wouldn't we?

very extraordinary because the ability to produce text doesn't imply sentience at all. Sentience is self-perception and self-awareness, not the abiltiy to churn out language tokens. Imagine instead of lambda or gpt-3 we take ten thousand years to walk through every possible conversation manually, write down and assign a percentage to every possible branch of conversation in a hash table. Call it the world's slowest,…

The key is “every possible conversation.” The reason it seems to support what you’re saying is that the human mind can’t imagine a list large enough to contain all that. So it goes to compare an ordinary grocery list to a human mind and therefore naturally hash tables could never be sentient.

When DALLE 2 creates a new image of an entirely novel scene, is it just copying and pasting? Of course not. It is distilling and reasoning in concepts. You can’t escape that. GTP and friends are doing something similar. Brushing aside these astounding strides as statistical tricks of the eye is stupid. Clearly these training algorithms are discovering things that are much deeper. There’s no reason to think sentience has been achieved but you are absolutely fooling yourself about the nature and trajectory of these programs.