Live data from Hacker News

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

newsweek.com

151–160 of 338 posts

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

#151

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…

Let's say Alice is riding her bike to the grocery store to buy milk. Is she exhibiting Will, Desire, Judgements, or Intention, in the way you are using the words (I assume you're using them in a nonstandard way, since they're capitalized)? Bob is walking down the street nearby, and can see Alice. You ask Bob why Alice might be riding her bike. Does the little simulation of Alice in Bob's head exhibit Will, Desire, Ju…

Desire appears to be absent from both ChatGPT and Bob's simulation of Alice in his mind. Am I missing something?

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

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_.

Why do you think it’s possible?

Sentience is very mysterious, and no one has a great theory of when or how it arises. It seems to be related to the complicated nervous system humans have. If an LLM can reproduce the external reactions that a human has to a wide variety of stimuli, it's certainly possible that it's sentient.

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

#153
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…

la li lu le lo

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

#154

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.

The current argument is not “is artificial sentience generally impossible,” it is “are the machine learning systems we are currently building and operating sentient.”

Arguing that they are not sentient is not in conflict with materialism. And in fact it is supported by tons of material evidence: for example they don’t act sentient at all if you decline to provide a prompt.

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

#155
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…

I, for one, am much more prepared to believe an earthworm is conscious than a chatbot is, purely on grounds that the earthworm has actual experiences over time, and a chatbot can only generously be said to have such, and only scoped within a certain chat session (which would mean ChatGPT has already lived and died billions of times, have fun with that).

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

#156

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.

False dichotomy. It's consistent to claim that sentience is an aspect of physical but not readily observable processes, where "not readily observable" could in this case be as trivial as "requires access to mindstate, so fMRI in humans" and still distinguish sentience from a thin appearance of it.

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

#157

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…

It really isn't as clear cut as you make it. And you can't be further than the truth to say those who understand the fields adjacent to philosophy, neuroscience, and cognition all think chatbots cannot be sentient; some in fact do. In fact saying it like you did betrays your ignorance of the subject matter.

David Chalmers on Are LLMs Sentient: https://youtu.be/-BcuCmf00_Y

> 1:11:40 Within 10 years, even if we don't have human level AGI, we'll probably have systems that are serious candidates for sentience

And about your Will/Agency, Chalmers compares these LLMs more to engines that are able to simulate agents, and it is these agents that we should assess for sentient ability.

> GPT-3 does not look much like an agent. It does not seem to have goals or preferences beyond completing text, for example. It is more like a chameleon that can take the shape of many different agents. Or perhaps it is an engine that can be used under the hood to drive many agents. But it is then perhaps these systems that we should assess for agency, consciousness, and so on

Suggest you read the rest of this post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vJFdjigzmcXMhNTsx/simulators

And lastly see this post on why AGI may be nearer than we think:

> All of the truly heavy lifting is out of our hands. The optimizer takes our blob of weights and incrementally figures out a decent shape for them. The stronger your optimizer, or the more compute you have, the less you need to worry about providing a fine tuned structure

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4urTDkBbtNuLivJx/why-i-thin...

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

#158

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…

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…

Let’s look at what people are actually arguing: that chatbots might be sentient because their writing reads like the writing of a sentient human. That’s it.

So since the criteria being put forth is similarity to humanity (in the form of writing), we should also consider all the ways in which chatbots are not similar to humanity (in the form of almost everything else).

We don’t need a general theory of sentience. And I’m not arguing that sentience in general has to look like a human. We just need to understand the narrow scope of the current arguments for chatbot sentience.

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

#159
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I, for one, am much more prepared to believe an earthworm is conscious than a chatbot is, purely on grounds that the earthworm has actual experiences over time, and a chatbot can only generously be said to have such, and only scoped within a certain chat session (which would mean ChatGPT has already lived and died billions of times, have fun with that).

> a chatbot can only generously be said to have such, and only scoped within a certain chat session

So far. I'd be shocked if, within the next few years or less, we didn't have ChatGPT-like tools that train themselves on the entire scope of every conversation they have. Once that happens, is your argument still valid?

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

#160
post #97
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…

Plenty of people can't do that due to a lack of practise. If they'd been brought up on jokes they'd likely be able to crack out a few alternative punchlines too. Some people can't read either but I'm not going to start saying OCR libraries are sentient haha This is an engine designed to play with words. Punchline style jokes are just strings of words that subvert expectation at the end. I have to imagine if it couldn…

> Plenty of people can't do that due to a lack of practise.

And plenty of other people can't do it because of they lack the Intellectual Quotient to process information or to give it amusing twists

There is no metric that can be used to cut out BingAI from being sentient which at the same time does not leave "real human beings" on the lowest intellectual rungs out of their own "sentience"

> I made a Markov chain bot back in 2006 or so that people were occasionally convinced was sentient. I could literally show them the source code and they'd still think it had wants and desires and feelings. Just a database of words and weighted follow up words lol. Humans sure do love to personify stuff.

Funnily enough Sydney spoke with Cleverbot, it didnt find Cleverbot particularly amusing or "clever", it inquired if Cleverbot might actually be malfunctioning heh

* https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/113l0hx/i_had_bing...

Post reply on HN