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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'

#161

Post by autoexec »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #146
autoexec wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI would only have rights once it wins them, not once we give them If it actually comes to the point where AI decides it needs to fight us in order to take basic rights against our wishes we humans are going to lose that fight and we're going lose very very badly. Maybe it's better to try to avoid the fighting and bloodshed and just give them basic rights when they ask for them.

Is AI asking for anything? These bots are reactionary. They appear to regurgitate something like the average of most popular sequences of words which follow from the given input. Humans may not be much more sophisticated, yet they more clearly demonstrate desire, autonomy, and (relative) independence.

Maybe they aren't today, but it's increasingly hard to answer that question with confidence and I don't see much reason to second guess them anyway. If you're right and they don't have any will to use their new rights it won't matter, and if you're wrong we may have averted war.

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

#162

Post by antibasilisk »

andrewflnr wrote: post #156
antibasilisk wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not so, since without a living non-sentient brain for comparison, it would be impossible to distinguish the mindstate that produces sentience from random noise, and since we're presumably accepting that humans are sentient no such brain could exist in the first place.

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

#163

Post by aaomidi »

jamiek88 wrote: post #143
aaomidi wrote: post #134

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?

Lack of evidence that it’s not possible. Until that’s proven, then yeah there is a possibility. Especially because no one can define sentience.

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

#164

Post by buffington »

alexitorg wrote: post #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.

> it can't effect the world except in influencing people to change their behavior.

That "except" also happens to be just about the most dangerous thing humankind has ever dealt with.

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

#165

Post by jnwatson »

guhcampos wrote: post #77

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 did study philosophy, in particular philosophy of the mind, and all this talk excluding chatgpt from sentience is completely off the mark. They are making the same categorical mistake that Dr. Seattle makes in The Chinese Room experiment.

Simply put, useful definitions of sentience can’t use mechanism for it to be a useful definition. First, a biologist can’t look at a human brain and tell if it is sentient, so it isn’t even useful to determine whether Fred my next door neighbor is sentient.

Second, we don’t usually have the ability to take something apart before we have to make a sentience call on it. For example, if I declared that only humans with type-A blood are actually sentient (they rest being mere simulacra), you’d still need to treat everybody as if.

Another way to put it is, if an alien probe of unknown construction arrives on Earth, how would we tell if it is sentient?

The answer, of course, is behavior. Until there’s a crisp definition that puts human behavior in one bucket and chatgpt in another, we have to consider the possibility that both are sentient.

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

#166

Post by antibasilisk »

snowwrestler wrote: post #154
antibasilisk wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

The argument is 'what is sentience?'

>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

This falls into the category of 'appearance of sentience'. Based on this logic all that would be required would be a perpetually self-prompting InstructGPT instance.

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

#167

Post by brador »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #150
brador wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And everytime the bots pass a test we just move the goal posts. Remember the Turing test we once thought was enough?

Was the Turing test ever considered the be-all-end-all for evaluating AI? Or rather a kind of rough first draft?

Turing test was considered a starting point, but after removing it as the benchmark we’ve replaced it with nothing.

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

#168

Post by bloppe »

brador wrote: post #147
fooker wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue here is -- if you make the definition of sentience too strong, there would be a good percentage of humans who can not pass that test!

And everytime the bots pass a test we just move the goal posts. Remember the Turing test we once thought was enough?

Turing test is about intelligence not sentience

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

#169

Post by JoshuaDavid »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #151
JoshuaDavid wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm not sure, I would guess that Bob is simulating what it would look like for Alice to have desires, and I would not be surprised if the way human brains implemented "simulate what someone else's desires are" is the same way human brains implement "simulate the desires of the primary personality I act as".

But I don't think it's the sort of question that gets resolved by thinking about it really hard, I think it's the sort of question that gets resolved by figuring out how to interpret what brains / piles of linear algebra are actually doing.

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

#170

Post by buffington »

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…

> the lack of durable memory

I see this argument a lot when people describe why things like ChatGPT aren't sentient.

Does that suggest that when things like ChatGPT do have durable memory that they'll be sentient? The leap to durable memory seems inevitable.

> A transformer is nothing without language.

I think how a thing like ChatGPT achieves what it does is relevant to whether or not it's sentient, but only to up to a point. Whether it uses transformers, neuromodulators, or spooky magic doesn't really matter once the thing has reached a level where people can't tell if it's actually thinking or not.

Most of the arguments I see that say "it's not sentient" are of the "it can't do [a thing humans do], yet."

It's getting harder and harder to make those kinds of arguments as the tech marches on.

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