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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'

#171

Post by snowwrestler »

antibasilisk wrote: post #166
snowwrestler wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 logi…

No, you’re trying to make the argument about “what is sentience?”

The comment at the top of this thread, to which you replied, states “Chatbots are not sentient.” Which is a narrower conversation.

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

#172

Post by andrewflnr »

buffington wrote: post #159
andrewflnr wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not this exact argument, no. At best it would need adjustment, depending on the specifics. Then again, you're proposing an entirely different class of technology, so you wouldn't expect an argument about a simpler technology to hold.

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

#173

Post by amf12 »

jnwatson wrote: post #165
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…

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

We might not be able to because of the "unknown construction". But we do know how LLMs are designed and how they operate, to understand that they are just mimicking language and aren't sentient.

I feel one key aspect of "sentience" is the sensations we feel when we have emotions. LLM's definitely lack that even if we can't know if they "feel" something.

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

#174

Post by rcarr »

So many people here are giving it the whole "morons, LLMs aren't sentient, they can't feel emotion, they can't interact with the world etc". Well yes, not at the moment. At the moment, it is most likely the mental equivalent to watching the Boston Dynamics dog get kicked. We know on some level that it is fake but it doesn't make you a moron for having an empathic response when you see it happen.

Not only this, but it is not a stretch to imagine that in the near future we could have one of these AIs inside a Boston Dynamics robot and the programming will have progressed to emulate emotions and goals and other such things. For example, if the robot falls down and detects one of its parts as being damaged we could program it to seek help and to use more swear words or panicked language until the damage is repaired. It could also be programmed to avoid the behaviour that lead up to the incident in the future which could be interesting as we may end up with anxious robots.

The difference between the human and the robot at this point is that their 'fear' is unfounded. Their damaged can be easily swapped out and repaired. Yet humans aren't too far off something similar with developments in organ development. The robot has the edge in that its entire inner world can be transferred to another medium for storage or into other robots which is something which is probably very far off (if ever possible) with humans.

Another difference you could argue is that the human emotion is a combination of physical sensation and behavioural state and that the robot is merely exhibiting the behavioural state and not the physical sensation. That it's 'fear' levels are just a data reading. This is sketchy territory though because the human's physical sensation is essentially electrical impulses flowing through nerves which could very easily represented as binary travelling through a wire.

I can't help but feel that the people declaring others "morons" are taking a very short term view of this and that we really need to be having this conversation now and defining our criteria for consciousness to avoid problems in the future. I'm in the latter stages of coding my blog up and in one of my first posts I'm going to try and define what I think those criteria should be. I think I've developed a decent set of questions and I'm looking forward to sharing that here and seeing what others think.

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

#175

Post by snowwrestler »

jnwatson wrote: post #165
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…

Until there’s a crisp definition that puts human behavior in one bucket and monkeys in another, we have to consider the possibility that both are sentient.

Until there’s a crisp definition that puts human behavior in one bucket and dogs in another, we have to consider the possibility that both are sentient.

Until there’s a crisp definition that puts human behavior in one bucket and trees in another, we have to consider the possibility that both are sentient.

Until there’s a crisp definition that puts human behavior in one bucket and mountain ranges in another, we have to consider the possibility that both are sentient.

This is fun. Do you see the flaw in the structure of the argument yet?

It’s begging the question. The burden is not how to disprove that ChatGPT is sentient, the burden is whether it’s possible to prove that it is sentient.

Otherwise it’s the rock that keeps away tigers, because do you see any tigers around here?

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

#176

Post by rcme »

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…

I’ve yet to see a single person who thinks LLMs aren’t sentient provide a verifiable definition of sentience.

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

#177

Post by Aeolun »

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…

> The model itself has no Will, no Desire, no Judgements, no Intention.

Isn’t the combined knowledge that it has what generates these things? I don’t think it’s much different from what humans learn over a lifetime.

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

#178

Post by antondd »

barking_biscuit wrote: post #73
factsaresacred wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we’ve already handed over the core societal function of information search and retrieval to them. Have we? For many people, ChatGPT3 is a curiosity. Talking to a bot is inefficient, requiring 'prompt engineering' and a tedious back-and-forth to get a legible response (that's often wrong!). Most people are not going to tolerate such a poor and slow user experience. For now using LLM-based chatbots is like having unl…

>Have we? For many people, ChatGPT3 is a curiosity. Talking to a bot is inefficient, requiring 'prompt engineering' and a tedious back-and-forth to get a legible response (that's often wrong!). Most people are not going to tolerate such a poor and slow user experience. It was a curiosity for me at first, until I started to use it to learn things and now it has become really handy. I used it to start teaching myself P…

I agree with you. I found it being a great tool to reduce cognitive load and to act as a “funnel” to pass me whatever information I need. Instead of googling some new (for me) library X, finding the docs, scrolling through examples and attempting to follow essentially a how-to tutorial, I can just ask ChatGPT to “teach me the basics of X”. Asking follow-up questions is a major part of that. Yes, there is no such thing as a stupid question. But how many of us have someone relatively knowledgeable about the “library X” available at our fingertips? For auto-didactic learning these LLMs are a godsend.

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

#179

Post by staticman2 »

jnwatson wrote: post #165
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…

What if there's no such thing as ChatGPT and you are a butterfly dreaming it is a human discussing ChatGPT?

Until there's a definitive answer to that question I'll keep spamming every ChatGPT thread with the demand people discuss butterflies.

Carry on.

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

#180

Post by Aeolun »

snowwrestler wrote: post #175
jnwatson wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Until there’s a crisp definition that puts human behavior in one bucket and monkeys in another, we have to consider the possibility that both are sentient. Until there’s a crisp definition that puts human behavior in one bucket and dogs in another, we have to consider the possibility that both are sentient. Until there’s a crisp definition that puts human behavior in one bucket and trees in another, we have to consid…

> Do you see the flaw in the structure of the argument yet?

Are you trying to claim that you know for certain mountains aren’t sentient?

Just because we don’t think it’s worth the effort of proving mountains are sentient, is no guarantee they are not.

For mountains that judgement is fairly easy to make, and it has worked out pretty well for us, but I do not think we can stretch that to every entity we want.

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