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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'

#131
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?

What was it doing before you interacted with it?

If we're going towards the idea that the AI sentience is being born and dying inside one response I don't think that can be considered sentient (by my earlier definition) as there's no idle time to measure idle brain activity.

It's a bit of a cop out response I know, I'd have done better if I could.

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

#132
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.

:)

I just typed a colon and a parenthesis. Your brain interpreted it as a smile on a human face.

You are equally mistaken in the use of your emotional sensor. Our brain fills in a LOT of gaps based on OUR training.

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

#133
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.

There's a stateless function at the heart of it, but modeling it as a Markov chain isn't useful and I wish people would stop saying that.

A Markov chain models a system as a state machine where each state has outgoing transitions with probabilities that are independent of all the other states. When the state being modeled is up to 4k tokens of text, considering each possible state independently results in vanishingly small probabilities. You can't train a system that way.

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

#134
post #108

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…

>People who even consider this need to get some reading done on philosophy. Are you perhaps trying to pass off your opinions and beliefs as 'philosophy and social sciences'? People who dismiss this out of hand have a bit more reading to do. Philosophers have been divided for millennia about the definition of sentience and consciousness. Questions like 'Is an earthworm conscious?', 'Can the earth be sentient?' have wi…

It’s what bothers me too. People pass off their opinion as if it’s settled fact.

My stance is it’s way too complicated to say if an LLM can be sentient, but it’s _possible_.

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

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yale University has a whole dog cognition center? I'm glad that we are plumbing the depths of the canine mind. That we are studying dogs doesn't prove that they're sentient. It goes without saying that I think dogs are sentient and aware, but hard evidence will probably always elude us at least until we understand what consciousness even is .

What would constitute proof? If your point is “proof is subjective” then yeah, I guess all words can be if you want them to. There’s no proof that hotdogs aren’t somersaults. There isn’t even a lab full of professionals studying this question or any published literature on the topic, so the jury is solidly out on that one.

Well the point here is that you can imagine that a robot dog would respond to cognitive tests in the exact same way a real dog would. How do we know the dog isn't also faking its experiences like you claim the robot is?

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

#139
post #117

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. So, psychopaths aren't sentient?

People conflate sentience with sapience.

I see. Well, TIL. Tbh the more I look at the resolution people (myself included) have for these concepts in general, it really does seem like it's so low as to be virtually meaningless. That even holds for the those individuals or groups of individuals who coined the terms in the first place.

To that end, I find myself gravitating more and more towards higher level abstractions that have multiple existence proofs (e.g. Control Theory) and just looking at everything through lenses like that.

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

#140

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…

This is not a tenable argument if you are a materialist. Either you accept the idea that human sentience is attributable to a soul (and therefore cease to be a materialist), you decide that the outward appearance of sentience is sufficient (which you might find to be troubling due to its potential implications for the insane), or you say that sentience is unknowable. There's no fourth option.

How about sentience being product of the body, its nervous system, evolutionary mechanisms and complexity?

As in - an emergent phenomenon made possible by the presence of all three?

Nothing we’ve seen in the realm of ai touches even a speck of the brain’s complexity and ongoing re-configuration in the presence of change and in the context of survival.

I’ve been reading George Lakoff’s work - turns out our ability to choose is based on an emotional component. Any rational decision is based on a preference, and all preferences are detected via the mechanism of emotion.

People with certain brain traumas resulting in damaged emotional centers become unable to make choices.

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