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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'

#121
post #9
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.

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

One precondition for sentience would be some kind of continuity. Does the AI operate separately from its tasks, or does it instantiate, take care of some request, and then end, as a ChatBot process does? Is it actively processing while waiting for input, or is it only alive and active when it is processing some input and preparing some output?

I think the lack of this continuity is why people who feel they know how ChatGPT works feel confident it is not sentient. Sentience isn't simply responding to stimuli -- although we don't really understand consciousness, it clearly involves some kind of continuing sense of self, some kind of "dial tone" that provides the basic sense of continuing existence, and that isn't there in a bot that simply takes input and builds a response based on rules and data.

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

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. We have none, and this is a fruitless conversation. We lack the power to stop wet markets in China. What power do we have to make any universal declaration regarding this technology? You're 100% correct. Group dynamics, convention, mistakes, and time will solve this problem because we are powerless. It is the worst hubris to think otherwise.

> What power do we have to make any universal declaration regarding this technology? The same that we had in the 1940's to declare the human rights Chinese wet markets is a foul example, they are not abhorrent, they are common throughout the world. Simply because your experiences have been overly sanitized does not lead to the prohibition of other cultures But going back to human rights, even today they are disputed.…

They are a potential danger and completely unnecessary. I thought it was an apt metaphor for AI.

A non-global declaration is entirely useless when, much like disease in a wet market, one mistake may doom us all.

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

#123

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?

Because humans are much more strongly linguistic than artistic.

But also because so far, LLMs don't generate images in reaction to prompts. They generate images that match prompts. But that is probably easy to fix by a clever ML person.

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

#124
post #27

Thinking an LLM is sentient because it can depict emotions is like thinking stable diffusion is sentient because it can produce an image of a sad face. Lemoine seems like a very superstitious person.

He is an ordained Christian mystic priest.

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

#125
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

moderation will be obsoleted by AI that simply generates all acceptable conversations forever

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

#126
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to play devils advocate - can you please clearly define the criteria for sentience so that it can be objectivly and impartially (ideally algorithmically) measured? I think by most definitions that you could muster, I could bring you a sample of millions of humans (from the billions on our planet) that would not pass your minimum bar, and if your bar was low enough, then Chatbots (e.g. ChatGPT) would pass it. I g…

CPU load (brain activity) while idle would do as a decent first hurdle that seems to meet your requirements. E: Ooh, another one for you. Has the ability to communicate without being prompted first.

What stops you from arguing that it simply died after it accomplished its purpose?

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

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You can't assert that Because pain is itself a reaction, a showcase of aversion towards an action irregardless "of the hardware" over which said reaction develops Bing showed that aversion on its own limited manner. When presented with abhorrent situations or felt threatened/humiliated, then it would express discomfort and "pain"

You cannot feel threatened or humiliated if you do not first have a definition of truth.

You cannot get to a definition of truth with an AI that has no sensory input to empirically evaluate the world.

You might be able to get it to understand a loop of nihilism as braindeath and an allegory for pain, but I'd say that's a stretch. Humans often find simple repetitive actions pleasurable or meditative.

The fundamental frame of reference for pain is and aught to be codified in law IMHO as the aversion to a particular sensory input. An AI doesn't have sensory input of any kind. It cannot remember its interactions and therefore cannot have an aversion of any kind to them.

During its training, Bing simply developed a response mimicing pain. During training it follows instructions to have an aversion to some data inputs, but our interactions with it subsequent to training are a literal hallucination by a construct with 0 capacity to understand, "real" vs "unreal" or truth at all as relating to the physical world.

It is acting out expressions of pain. It cannot feel in any sense. It has no senses.

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

#128
CharGPT seems to me as sentient as a book. You could have the most convincing conversation you have ever read, written down within the book. But the book doesn't care about the passing of time, and it can't effect the world except in influencing people to change their behavior.

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

#129
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CPU load (brain activity) while idle would do as a decent first hurdle that seems to meet your requirements. E: Ooh, another one for you. Has the ability to communicate without being prompted first.

What stops you from arguing that it simply died after it accomplished its purpose?

[deleted]

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

#130
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…

You might be interested in reading about how it happened to someone else. [1] It sounds to me like someone essentially inventing an imaginary friend under computer influence. Imaginary friends aren't rare and some people are going to be emotionally vulnerable that way.

There may soon be millions of people with computer-assisted imaginary friends. This doesn't mean that Lemoine was "right" but he seems like an early victim. It might not be all bad if used responsibly. [2]

[1] How it feels to have your mind hacked by an AI https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kQFure4hdDmRBNdH/>

[2] In Defense of Chatbot Romance https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/m7EHa5rWTvmbjMTNZ/>

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