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

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81–90 of 338 posts

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

#81
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 don’t think these LLMs are sentient, but that is an unverifiable belief. Others believe and once enough do it’s as good as fact anyway.

I agree. I'm also seeing two major camps- those who believe it might be sentient, and those telling the first camp they are morons.

Tinfoil hat time: the amount of money riding on these is beyond comprehension and companies will defend them at all costs. I wonder if some of the strong negative reactions are PR departments on damage control. Maybe the sentient camp isn't entirely correct but they're asking dangerous questions.

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

#83
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Lock 2 AIs that haven't been programmed with language in a room, given time do they develop the ability to communicate and express ideas, desires, needs to each other? There have been several instances of language evolving again, deaf people creating sign language, etc. A sentient intelligence should be driven to understand concepts and convey them, probably over multiple mediums. That's why the turning test is a goo…

This already happened.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/facebook-shuts-down-ai-robot-...

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

#84
post #79

Chatbots are not sentient. People who even consider this need to get some reading done on philosophy and social sciences, and Reddit does not count. Some AI Models are extremely good at manipulating masses of people, yes, but they are Tools, not Architects. There's people using these tools too manipulate other people. The model itself has no Will, no Desire, no Judgements, no Intention. There might be a day when AI g…

I might sound a little bit 'tinfoil hat' here, but I believe that what follows is not hyperbole. AI is already the 'Architect' more than most of us would like to admit. Even if it is not sentient, the various AIs that we use during the day were designed with a purpose and they are goal oriented. It is worth reading Daniel Dennet's thoughs about the intentional stance--we know that a toaster is not sentient, but it wa…

What about a system emerging from another system? https://clementneo.com/posts/2023/02/11/we-found-an-neuron

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

#85
post #12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Pass a Turing test with a competent judge. ChatGPT or any other bot won't be able to pass it.

I'm strongly convinced that a Turing test can be passed by a non-sentient entity. Being sentient and smart is sufficient to fool a judge, but not necessary, people can be fooled by stupid illusions.

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

#86
The sentience argument is a bit confusing. The fact that it can produce language is definitely interesting but with that said I haven't seen any arguments that stable diffusion is sentient.

The technology although different is also mostly the same.

Can someone provide me why image generation is not sentient but word generation is?

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

#88

I feel sorry for the guy. Talking to AI bot all day may severely affect anyone's health. I can't do it for longer than 10 minutes at a time. I wonder why health impact of communication with AI hasn't received greater attention.

> Talking to AI bot all day may severely affect anyone's health. Why?

We're hardwired to anthropomorphize things, to see slight patterns even when they aren't there, and to overemphasize plausible narratives when evaluating the truthfulness of assertions.

A chatbot optimized to generate plausible-looking text is a very good fit for these known weak spots in human judgment, it's effectively punching below the waist all the time. And when something (or anyone - including humans!) systematically spews high-quality bullshit at you, that is effectively gaslighting, which is harmful to your perception of reality and mental health.

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

#89
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> We humans do have this emotional sensor we can use to probe the minds of others.

Wait, what? I certainly don't have one. Most of us (not all! neurotypical experience isn't universal) have a somewhat effective skill, continuously trained since childhood, to guess at the emotions of others based on various visual and behavioral cues, but we also know that these visible cues can be faked by (for example) a skilled actor, as the "sensor" has zero insight to the actual emotional experience.

If I make the assumption that someone else (e.g. you) function the same as I do, then I can reason that "your behavior X implies your emotional experience Y, because it does for me"; however, if we can't make that assumption, or (as is the case for non-human minds) we know that the process is substantially different - then there is literally zero basis for any trustworthy reasoning whatsoever about that internal emotional state.

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

#90
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Even if we are, gpt-3 is less sapient still. There's no ongoing process, nowhere for intelligence to even potentially reside. It's just a pile of bits no more self-aware than a floppy disk. It's perhaps at least in principle possible for some kind of intelligence to be emergent from and exist during the process of inference, but it seems extremely unlikely that that is happening and, moreover, were it happening, it s…

Your cortex is my A100. Your optical nerve is my PCI cable. Your eyes are my multifocal lens cameras. Which part of you do you attribute your intelligence to?
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