The question of whether or not chatbots are sentient is orthogonal to the question of whether current AI systems are going to be deployed by malicious actors against a society that does not understand the risks or capabilities of current AI or have effective countermeasures against it. The answer to that second question is: obviously, yes, and soon. “AI alignment” dorks are so distracted by the Clippy scenario that they can’t see the more obvious danger right in front of us.
'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'
201–210 of 338 posts
Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'
#202Chatbots 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…
Dr Searle isn’t making a mistake, behaviorists are just unbelievably stubborn. Just because you cannot measure internal experience doesn’t mean we cant talk about it. That’s just being dishonest.
I also used to be a behaviorist but I grew up and became comfortable with not being able to objectify everything. Its okay. There is a subjective dimension. In fact, its great.
Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'
#203I’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 larg…
To add on that, if you have a system solely for conversing with and about other conscious beings, you can hack that into a system for conversing about anything by treating inanimate objects as particularly shy and sloth like beings. Its nice as you don't need grammatical rules to handle the distinction between animate and inanimate object functions. Eg, any method of learning information can be phrased as "X told me Y." Jack told me. The equations tell me. I told myself. You can even personify large forces beyond your comprehension or the universe as a whole. In that case we usually call it "religion".
Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'
#204Earlier 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…
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 huma…
> then consider themselves wiser
Nonono, they ARE wiser, they ARE wiser for understanding that these frameworks are not quantized or quantifiable and instead are gradients with undefined boundaries over which lines on the sand are dejure undefinable. That realization MAKES them wiser and it makes anyone whom understands it wiser, yes.
> Is anything real?
The sum of modern philosophy might state that "That's up to you to decide" :)
> This is such a dumb sentence.
No it is not, you are just in disagreement with it, because you mentally would prefer your handhanded and have certainty on a realm where certainty is hard to come-by. That's an understandable, empathizable behavior, most people tend to abhor uncertainty
> you're a AFDUNOIAFNDMLOISABFID, because you can't define it.
I mean, I could be, apparently the world is defined by you, so it could be left up to you to decide (?), you'd be surprised of how people with different wild and exotic mental disturbances get day to day. I would recommend you to read up on it, it is very interesting
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGTXnxFj414
> You can't presume that concepts have merit because they are represented by language.
If you were to argue with some Linguists, they might say that the opposite is true, that language itself is what anchors concepts onto "existence". One very interesting situation, is that apparently the very conception or at least verbalization and therefore social anchoring of concepts like "colors", is itself dependent on language evolving
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea_(Homer)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...
Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'
#205Earlier 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…
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 huma…
Your argument is in essence „sentience is as I‘d like it to be“. Perhaps you‘re arguing out of fear?
Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'
#206I’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 larg…
I'm more interested in going the other way: the urge to create very narrow categories into which only humans fit, attempting to exclude other animals or things that could be like humans. Human exceptionalism, let's call it.
Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'
#207The sentience argument is a bit confusing. The fact that it can produce language is definitely interesting but with that said I haven't seen any arguments that stable diffusion is sentient. The technology although different is also mostly the same. Can someone provide me why image generation is not sentient but word generation is?
Imagine a perfect simulation of a brain within a computer. It can learn/feel/remember/act/perdict/etc. just like a human brain. Most people would call this simulation sentient. If you took that same simulation but changed the internal structure to something else, but it was still capable of the exact same outputs for given inputs, is it still sentient? A perfect chatbot would be an example of one of these simulations.
Your answer to the question isn't really the point here, i'm just trying to clarify the argument.
Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'
#208I’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 larg…
True. We’ll feel like they are sentient way before they are.
Of course, they could already be sentient.
Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 huma…
Please calm down. I am in your side wrt sentience here but you are just ranting. They’ve presented a compelling argument: if we don’t have anything other than behavior to go by to gauge sentience then there is no meaningful way to say we have it and bots dont as of now. You can disagree with the premise or provide a counter argument.
> if we don’t have anything other than behavior to go by to gauge sentience then there is no meaningful way to say we have it and bots dont as of now
No. this is the same stupid claim.
If you can't define X, you cannot conclude that A may be a part of X. You've already established that X is meaningless. It is meaningless to state anything about X. When you assert that A may be a part of X, you're playing both sides and implying that the original higher level interpretation of what X is is valid again.
I am indeed ranting. Because it's a fallacious argument that appears in pretty much every philosphical argument as an appeal to non cognizance when its really an issue with language.
Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'
#210Sentient or not, if the thing on the screen or the voice on our device seems human, isn't that enough to open up profound new human connections and experiences for us? If you've ever interacted with people with severe brain damage or later-stage dementia, they can at times seem very normal during certain small talk. But if you ask the right questions, things break down quickly and you realize their experience of real…
"Oh you think my Lydia isn't capable of love? The most recent benchmarks put her at 300 kiloloves/S. She outputs more love than the entire country of uruguay."