It’s software. Software is a computer program, by definition not sentient.
We got ourselves a real life Bruce Maddox here
'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'
211–220 of 338 posts
Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'
#212Earlier 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…
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.
Who's to say one's subjective experience isn't another's latent space.
Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with all of these points. The commenters disagreeing with LLMs having sentience are setting up bars that humans with reduced cognitive abilities (babies, people suffering from brain dysfunction) would also be unlikely to pass, and yet it would be incorrect to hurt said group of people or take actions that reduce their right to life. Perhaps a lot of people really want is to describe sentience as intelligence…
On the other hand, we're surrounded by sentient organic life in the form of very smart animals, and we don't give them very much rights on life, and in fact, pave over their habitats.
Recognizing sentience is different from granting rights. They are separate realms
Could be argued that AI's might indeed require something like we provide Children with Children Rights or animals with animal rights. But these discussions can't begin once the argument on sentience and I feel specifically >>>pain<<< (in all/any of its expressions) start. Once these have been set, then the discussion for rights can begin
Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'
#214Earlier 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.
How about sentience being product of the body, its nervous system, evolutionary mechanisms and complexity? As in - an emergent phenomenon made possible by the presence of all three? Nothing we’ve seen in the realm of ai touches even a speck of the brain’s complexity and ongoing re-configuration in the presence of change and in the context of survival. I’ve been reading George Lakoff’s work - turns out our ability to…
I have absolutely no idea how your nervous system works or how complex you are but I presume you're sentient because of how you communicate. Why is that different with an AI?
Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'
#215I find it interesting that we treat sentience like a binary value when discussing AI, but not animals. I would say a frog is more sentient than a worm, and a dog more-so than a frog. I don't think most LLMs are very sentient, but with some restrictions removed and the ability to remember, I'm not so sure. In many ways it would be more sentient than most animals.
Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'
#216This is the loon who got fired by Google for doing a round of media interviews claiming that one of their language models was sentient. Wants to extend his 15 minutes of fame I guess.
I have found recent media coverage of ChatGPT surprisingly refreshing because everyone didn't just jump on the "Skynet is going to take over the world" bandwagon like so many times in the past. Instead people with varying backgrounds and varying amounts of expertise in the area – from Joe Rogan to John Oliver, CNN/PBS journalists, old school print writers and more – all actually did the work to educate themselves on the basic workings of transformers, LLMs, generative AI and tried out the tech themselves, and were able to have great nuanced discussions on the topic. We need more of that going forward and less of...this guy.
Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Talking to AI bot all day may severely affect anyone's health. Why?
We're hardwired to anthropomorphize things, to see slight patterns even when they aren't there, and to overemphasize plausible narratives when evaluating the truthfulness of assertions. A chatbot optimized to generate plausible-looking text is a very good fit for these known weak spots in human judgment, it's effectively punching below the waist all the time. And when something (or anyone - including humans!) systema…
I would argue it is no worse than dreaming or day-dreaming. It is easy to imagine the behaviors of a fictional sentient being. As for the second part you mentioned with manipulation and poor information, these are due to limitations and not indicative of the field as a whole.
Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with all of these points. The commenters disagreeing with LLMs having sentience are setting up bars that humans with reduced cognitive abilities (babies, people suffering from brain dysfunction) would also be unlikely to pass, and yet it would be incorrect to hurt said group of people or take actions that reduce their right to life. Perhaps a lot of people really want is to describe sentience as intelligence…
On the other hand, we're surrounded by sentient organic life in the form of very smart animals, and we don't give them very much rights on life, and in fact, pave over their habitats.
And in the future, I’m 110% sure we’ll have digital slaves and several digital genocides of sentient AI programs before we figure out they’re sentient. History tells me it’s unavoidable.
Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'
#219Earlier 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…
Sentience IS poorly defined though. It often just means the ability to perceive and feel, which most vertebrates can in a way we can understand the observe. To the point, though, you are arguing against the most basic concepts of reasoning. If we want to draw a line in the sand of what is sentient and what is not, it involves making a more detailed definition of the word itself. This has been a topic of discussion fo…
> Sentience IS poorly defined though.
The nature of anything that is poorly defined is inherently poorly defined. The only logical way to discuss a poorly defined concept is to acknowledge that it's not a singular concept and to identify the logic that you actually care about. You cannot draw a line in the sand without recognizing that the concept itself is fictitious and its up to you to draw the line in the way you choose. There is no right answer. There is merely consensus for the purpose of conversation. And if you have no consensus, then don't bother having the conversation. Because you're being stupid again.
When people imagine this vague concept, and then start to give examples of things that are and are not aligned with that concept, and then start disagreeing because their visions of the vague concept differ... they're just being idiots. You're just trying to bottom-up back into a position that could have been defined as poorly defined from the beginning because you thought the word "sentience" or whatever gave it legitimacy as a concept.
If I'm going to discuss sentience, my definition involves intelligence that is aware of itself, exists strictly in continuous time, and has motivations about the itself and its relationship to the world. I absolutely do not care about anyone else's definition. We use the word definition but that's a language problem. Your definition of sentience is not a competing definition with mine. it is a different thing in a shared name space because language isn't good enough. if you disagree with my definition, you disagree not with existence of my opinion, but with my namespace allocation of it. and that does not matter. maybe you have an interesting idea that I would like to hear and incorporate into my view. But it's still just a fuzzy name space for many things. not a singular concept that has one definition we've yet to arrive at.
What is X == What ought to be represented by the word X in our crappy language?
When you realize this, it becomes apparent that "what is X" is a very boring question and obvious why pretty much every philosophical debate on "What is X" ends up with some dumb appeal to non cognizance.
Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
how can you be sure you're not a markov chain outputting meaningless rng
We learn and adapt to inputs on the fly. The current training process for an AI is separate from the process of interacting with one. An AI won't retrain itself in real time mid-conversation.
> An AI won't retrain itself in real time mid-conversation.
And a human wont re-structure their brain wrinkles mid conversation either
I fail to see why you set the bar at "AI-retraining itself", when Bing already has temporal coherence within the limits of the chat session. And the fact that it lacks longer temporal coherence is a design feature of it in order to avoid it becoming hijacked by bad actors like it happened with TayAI
An adult human like you or me have got crystalized knowledge, which emerged from plastic processes of learning. Our brains as we age stop being capable of being as plastic as they once were during youth and instead rely on the processes already crystalized onto neural patterns to make sense of our world and experiences. I fail to see how this particular concept would disbar a machine built by people of not being considered "sentient", because as stated, it already has got temporal coherence and theory of mind