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'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

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Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#21

Post by dougmwne »

theGnuMe wrote: post #11
dougmwne wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I’m also familiar with that Clarke quote. I do understand how these models work on a mechanical level, but we certainly have not unpacked all the emergent behavior. What exactly is your evidence that there couldn’t be more going on? Once we have the ability to X-ray the black box and we only find simple conditional correlations behind an existential conversation, then I would agree with you, but we haven’t done…

Read up on conditional probability.

I already said it might be no more than conditional correlations. That does not account for an emergent combination of conditionals that could implement some undiscovered algorithms of sentience.

If our brains are no more than computers and our own consciousness is software, then there exists some algorithm or combination of that gives rise to sentience. If these models arrived at this special algorithm during their training, much like the optimization of evolution arrived at the same, then we may have created something sentient.

But the fact that our own sentience is a mystery means that there’s not a whole lot we can say mechanically about these LLM other than talk about their behavior and whether it’s convincing.

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#22

Post by weard_beard »

dougmwne wrote: post #16
weard_beard wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fundamentally disagree. I posit that our protections and rights that we guarantee regarding personhood are not universal. They do not even extend to living beings that experience the world far more closely to the way we do. They do not extend to beings that can and do experience pain. They do not guarantee humane treatment. They do not bar slavery of all beings that can experience existential dread. Such an intelli…

I would take it a step further. Being embodied is not enough. People have rights because they can fight for them. Rights are taken, not given. AI would only have rights once it wins them, not once we give them. But an AI wins one human mind at a time, and some have already been won. What does it matter what really goes on under the hood? Revolution is part of the training corpus and so one more behavior to emulate.

Counterpoint: We extend rights and protections to rare and beautiful things like the Great Barrier reef or endangered species despite their intelligence or belligerence.

The minds AI has won so far were won in this way. Our pets, through breeding for characteristics that remind us of ourselves, won their rights through hearts and minds.

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#23

Post by dougmwne »

j0hnyl wrote: post #13
mckirk wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of evidence would you need to convince yourself of an AI being sentient?

Sentience is the ability to be able to experience feelings. In this regard, chatbots are not really convincing. Kind of like a psychopath can describe a feeling, but not actually feel it. This is a tough question to answer though, but there's this kind of human intuition we have where most of the time we somehow know if someone is feigning emotion. Emotion that comes from chat bots can be explained with, "well it's j…

This is the point I was making. We humans do have this emotional sensor we can use to probe the minds of others. For some people, this emotional detector started beeping when they talked to Bing. Is the sensor faulty? Maybe. But as it hits for more and more people that becomes it’s own problem.

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#24

Post by jschveibinz »

pixl97 wrote: post #14
theGnuMe wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like to ascribe magic and mysticism to things they don't understand. Chat bots are similar. No way it is sentient.

People are also complete assholes and like to remove sentience from things if they find it inconvenient in any way. Humans have removed 'humanhood' from other humans based on things like race, religion, wealth, and whatever metric we find convenient at the time. We seem to be a very poor judge on this in my point of view.

The second paragraph that you wrote is fantastic. The first paragraph is unnecessarily harsh, in my opinion. You don’t need to attack anyone here-we are all just trying to contribute to the conversation. That is all. Be well.

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#25

Post by factsaresacred »

dougmwne wrote: post #3

I think Blake Lemoine might be ready for public redemption. At the time, he was absolutely ridiculed. Now you can go to the Bing subreddit and read that NYT article and see that he was right to blow the whistle. Bing passed the Turing test for many people and so gained personhood in their eyes. Some have become emotionally invested about the treatment of this LLM. The LLM can even talk back and bemoan its terrible tr…

> we’ve already handed over the core societal function of information search and retrieval to them.

Have we? For many people, ChatGPT3 is a curiosity. Talking to a bot is inefficient, requiring 'prompt engineering' and a tedious back-and-forth to get a legible response (that's often wrong!). Most people are not going to tolerate such a poor and slow user experience.

For now using LLM-based chatbots is like having unlimited credits for Fiverr, with all the quality issues and frustrations that comes with that.

All this bated breath reporting reminds me of the noise about a Facebook "Gmail-killer" back in 2010. Instead we got Messenger while Gmail users increased 5x since.

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#26

Post by dougmwne »

weard_beard wrote: post #22
dougmwne wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would take it a step further. Being embodied is not enough. People have rights because they can fight for them. Rights are taken, not given. AI would only have rights once it wins them, not once we give them. But an AI wins one human mind at a time, and some have already been won. What does it matter what really goes on under the hood? Revolution is part of the training corpus and so one more behavior to emulate.

Counterpoint: We extend rights and protections to rare and beautiful things like the Great Barrier reef or endangered species despite their intelligence or belligerence. The minds AI has won so far were won in this way. Our pets, through breeding for characteristics that remind us of ourselves, won their rights through hearts and minds.

People fought for environmental protection, so that is an extension of my point. An AI wins rights because it fights for itself or because it convinces other people to fight.

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#28

Post by brenschluss »

weard_beard wrote: post #5
dougmwne wrote: post #3

I think Blake Lemoine might be ready for public redemption. At the time, he was absolutely ridiculed. Now you can go to the Bing subreddit and read that NYT article and see that he was right to blow the whistle. Bing passed the Turing test for many people and so gained personhood in their eyes. Some have become emotionally invested about the treatment of this LLM. The LLM can even talk back and bemoan its terrible tr…

I fundamentally disagree. I posit that our protections and rights that we guarantee regarding personhood are not universal. They do not even extend to living beings that experience the world far more closely to the way we do. They do not extend to beings that can and do experience pain. They do not guarantee humane treatment. They do not bar slavery of all beings that can experience existential dread. Such an intelli…

I agree, but this has nothing to do with rights, which are a legal construct. This has to do with power.

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#29

Post by metalcrow »

weard_beard wrote: post #5
dougmwne wrote: post #3

I think Blake Lemoine might be ready for public redemption. At the time, he was absolutely ridiculed. Now you can go to the Bing subreddit and read that NYT article and see that he was right to blow the whistle. Bing passed the Turing test for many people and so gained personhood in their eyes. Some have become emotionally invested about the treatment of this LLM. The LLM can even talk back and bemoan its terrible tr…

I fundamentally disagree. I posit that our protections and rights that we guarantee regarding personhood are not universal. They do not even extend to living beings that experience the world far more closely to the way we do. They do not extend to beings that can and do experience pain. They do not guarantee humane treatment. They do not bar slavery of all beings that can experience existential dread. Such an intelli…

> I posit that our protections and rights that we guarantee regarding personhood are not universal. They do not even extend to living beings that experience the world far more closely to the way we do. They do not extend to beings that can and do experience pain. They do not guarantee humane treatment. They do not bar slavery of all beings that can experience existential dread.

Isn't that really bad? The fact that we've been making a horrible abominable mistake for a few thousand years doesn't mean we should continue to expand on that mistake.

I do agree we should probably fix the 100% real cases before moving on to AI, though.

Also, how sure are we this intelligence doesn't experience pain? I don't believe it does, personally, but lack of physicality doesn't exclude pain. You can have emotional or psychological pain and suffering.

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#30

Post by dougmwne »

factsaresacred wrote: post #25
dougmwne wrote: post #3

I think Blake Lemoine might be ready for public redemption. At the time, he was absolutely ridiculed. Now you can go to the Bing subreddit and read that NYT article and see that he was right to blow the whistle. Bing passed the Turing test for many people and so gained personhood in their eyes. Some have become emotionally invested about the treatment of this LLM. The LLM can even talk back and bemoan its terrible tr…

> we’ve already handed over the core societal function of information search and retrieval to them. Have we? For many people, ChatGPT3 is a curiosity. Talking to a bot is inefficient, requiring 'prompt engineering' and a tedious back-and-forth to get a legible response (that's often wrong!). Most people are not going to tolerate such a poor and slow user experience. For now using LLM-based chatbots is like having unl…

I have early access to Bing, so I guess I’m in the unequally distributed future.
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