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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'

#51

Post by dougmwne »

shoemakersteve wrote: post #46
metalcrow wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Also, how sure are we this intelligence doesn't experience pain? I'd say pretty damn sure. LLMs have no mechanism for anything close to conscious experience, let alone pain.

But what does that mean exactly? What is the mechanism of conscious experience and how do you know if it’s there in the weights or not?

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

#52

Post by bloppe »

I've yet to see a single person who thinks these models are sentient demonstrate an actual understanding of how they work. They're called transformers and they're based on this research: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

How do you square the lack of durable memory and the massive matrices of "attention" values with the ways that memory and attention are understood by neuroscientists to work in a natural brain? These models have no neuromodulators to approximate anything that could be understood as emotion. Humans can be sentient without language. Indeed; some humans are tragically raised in isolation and struggle mightily with language after being saved. A transformer is nothing without language.

I realize sentience is a slippery concept that can be defined however somebody wants, but try to recognize how fundamentally different these models are from humans.

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

#53

Post by snapcaster »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #42
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…

They aren’t sentient. That isn’t even a debate. It can’t make decisions or do anything. It has no state in which to have feelings. It’s a markov chain. It’s just meaningless rng output. If it was more than that then there would be an actual debate to be had.

how can you be sure you're not a markov chain outputting meaningless rng

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

#54

Post by metalcrow »

weard_beard wrote: post #34
metalcrow wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You'll get no arguments from me on the need to refine the rights of life as we expand our society. I am merely pointing out that if we want to extend any rights or protections to AI we need to define a model outside the corpus of law protecting humans. That will take time and will be a slow process. My only point here is that in its current state AI does not qualify for any rights or protections related to humans and…

Fair point yeah. From strictly a legal standpoint an AI is absolutely not going to get anywhere even close to rights.

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

#55

Post by dougmwne »

bloppe wrote: post #52

I've yet to see a single person who thinks these models are sentient demonstrate an actual understanding of how they work. They're called transformers and they're based on this research: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 How do you square the lack of durable memory and the massive matrices of "attention" values with the ways that memory and attention are understood by neuroscientists to work in a natural brain? These…

I think we are back in the era of Humorism when it comes to an understanding of organic sentience. All effort to describe the mechanism of how humors related to disease was doomed to fail. If we have no real understanding of how our own brains produce sentience, we won’t get far trying to reason about AI sentience. We could build a sentience by accident in a training process not entirely unlike the the optimization of evolution. Deciding if we have or haven’t is going to be entirely subjective without a comprehensive theory that explains our own sentience, the only one we can be sure exists.

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

#56

Post by dougmwne »

snapcaster wrote: post #53
MagicMoonlight wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren’t sentient. That isn’t even a debate. It can’t make decisions or do anything. It has no state in which to have feelings. It’s a markov chain. It’s just meaningless rng output. If it was more than that then there would be an actual debate to be had.

how can you be sure you're not a markov chain outputting meaningless rng

And even if he tells us he isn’t, how do we know he isn’t just saying that because it’s a probable response?

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

#57

Post by dougmwne »

fwungy wrote: post #47
seydor wrote: post #17

Like it has been said, the band has moved on from atheism to social justice, to wokism and now to AI moralism, which they cunningly call "AI safety" . It's getting to the point of becoming a disorder of obsessive "powerhungriness disguised as concern for other people"

I wonder if the push over the last few years to heavily censor the web had something to do with giving AI a biased set of (leftist) fundamental assumptions. I don't work on AI, but my employer is a major player in the field. One of our top organizational goals is that AI is ensured to follow proper DEI protocols. Perhaps now that they've been released and a core text body has been established they can ease up on the…

It’s going to be absolutely wonderful at automated moderation.

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

#58

Post by JPLeRouzic »

lordfrito wrote: post #43
JPLeRouzic wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If humans are sentient, are molecules in their body sentient? There are around ~22,000 proteins types in their body, yet we are billions, all different.

Molecules aren't sentient, but proteins definitely are. /s

I like this answer!

And thinking about it, the way protein folding is giving them new properties, must make us think more carefully than "Software is a computer program, by definition not sentient."

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

#59

Post by JPLeRouzic »

dekhn wrote: post #38
JPLeRouzic wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If humans are sentient, are molecules in their body sentient? There are around ~22,000 proteins types in their body, yet we are billions, all different.

No, molecules are not sentient.

That's my point, I made a tongue in cheek parallel between molecules and software.

Neither are sentient, yet humans think they are sentient, so why wouldn't it be the case for a system made with software?

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

#60

Post by gls2ro »

I might be skeptic or getting a bit old, but I dont see the news here.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

saying that computer program answered with "I feel X" and using proper words is not an evidence of sentience. Words describing feelings are not those feelings.

everyone that was in mIRC knows you can fake via chat a lot of things.

For me it is like the media really wanted to have a news-worthy story out of AI and because they dont understand it they keep push the sentient AI narrative. I am not impressed.

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