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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'

#181

Post by spywaregorilla »

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…

People who "study philosophy" always do this dumb thing where they pounce on something for being poorly defined and then consider themselves wiser for arguing that the ambiguity of the words means that obvious non examples "could be described" and just double back to the original definition.

Is a rock alive? Is my imagination of a chinese room "art"? Is anything real?

> 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.

This is such a dumb sentence. Well we can't define it so we have to consider that both are described by it? No. If you can't define it you just can't use it in any meaningful way. By your same logic you would have to consider the possibility that you're a AFDUNOIAFNDMLOISABFID, because you can't define it. You can't presume that concepts have merit because they are represented by language.

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

#182

Post by stocknoob »

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…

Apes with this particular set of DNA are presumed to be fully sentient, and apes with a slightly different set are not, even though their behavior is indistinguishable until age 1 (or never, in some cases). Also, to be presumed sentient, you have to be made of meat, not metal.

Look, I don’t make the rules, they are universal laws and just happen to affirm my sentience.

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

#183

Post by spywaregorilla »

Aeolun wrote: post #180
snowwrestler wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mountains aren't sentient.

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

#184

Post by Aeolun »

buffington wrote: post #170
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 t…

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

There’s also that story of the man who just reset every day. He couldn’t keep any long term memory past his 40th birthday or so. Does that make him non-sentient?

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

#185

Post by Aeolun »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #183
Aeolun wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Mountains aren't sentient.

By what definition of sentient, and how do you know?

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

#186

Post by KyleBerezin »

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…

I think part of the issue is the that we use sentience in a binary sense. Like there is some kind of abstract line you can pass that makes you sentient. I personally feel that it is more useful to look at it as a spectrum. A lot of factors play into it, but as a society we already do this.

The idea that some animals are closer to human levels of sentients has caused some people to avoid consuming those animals, such as dolphins vs. fish, or dogs vs. chickens. No one has put numbers to it as far as I know, but I feel that people/society has drawn conclusions based on an unspoken ranking.

If we were to make a numerical scale of sentience, I could imagine that perhaps humans wouldn't be a '10', either as a whole or in any one category. Whatever traits combine to make sentience, it is hard to believe that we embody the theoretical maximum of all of those traits.

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

#187

Post by staticman2 »

Aeolun wrote: post #180
snowwrestler wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

We don't know anything for sure.

Philip k. Dick believed the modern world was an illusion created by Satan and it was actually the year 50 AD.

But if I keep posting "How do you know computers aren't an illusion created by Satan?" anytime someone wants to discuss computer software I probably deserve to be laughed out of the conversation.

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

#188

Post by rishav_sharan »

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…

> Chatbots are not sentient.

The problem as always, is that such assertions are meaningless till you have a precise and universally accepted definition of sentience.

Till then people will use their subjective opinion for judging sentience, and many would likely find chatbots to be sentient based on their own personal definition

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

#189

Post by mproud »

I’m surprised there isn’t more conversation around our human desire to treat objects and non-sentient beings like people. Whether it’s naming a sailboat and giving it a gender, or building a robot and treating it like a human.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand many organic things do feel varying degrees of pain and pleasure, and they should be respected. But I think assigning, pretending, or otherwise believing a largely inorganic, man-made scripted machine has consciousness or sentience is driven chiefly from an inherent quality of being human.

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

#190

Post by CyanBird »

thfuran wrote: post #92
cellis wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your cortex is my A100. Your optical nerve is my PCI cable. Your eyes are my multifocal lens cameras. Which part of you do you attribute your intelligence to?

The hardware isn't the point. A modern computer is probably sufficient to support at least some sort of consciousness with the right software, but it cannot be conscious while it's turned off. There's no process occurring that could implement consciousness. A language model is effectively turned off except during inference.

> A language model is effectively turned off except during inference.

That's unarguably correct, but what's the difference between that and the limits on Hz and intake rate on our own human minds?

Our brain waves work at 12/8hz and some others higher. If you were to shutdown all instances of the model and have it be defacto "always turned on" working on "real time inputs". Then you would argue that this thing is "alive", right?

Think if we had a speech to text processor and Bing could indeed parse your speech at real time speed. Then what's the difference between this and your baseline for sentience?

Do you consider a person with dementia to be sentient? Even when their brains are unable to operate on the same speed as yours? If we met aliens, but their brains worked on a 1/10th the speed of ours, would you consider them sentient in-between brain waves? If we met aliens, and their brains worked at x100 the speed of ours. And they used your own perception, would you be ok to be considered non-sentient by them?

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