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

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251–260 of 338 posts

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

#251
ITT " muh AI is not 'sentient'. I know how to code ML model from scratch lol you're wrong". Except that's not the point beings discussed. Our unconscious brain cannot discern screen and reality. My memories of people who unironically belive in historical fiction and how long it took to convince them it's not real... all of that combined tells me that Ai,,, is extremely dangerous. You, a very bright hacker news reader, 1% of humanity, did not have time to ponder what's really being discusssed in that relatively short article and being willingly manipulated by not even that clever copywriting tactic to muddy the waters.

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

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chatbots are a simulation of a human, so gauging their sentience can be as simple as how human-like they are. An octopus is a different discussion and would involve deconstructing the idea of sentience. Can it exist without language? Are we just using it as a synonym for human-like? But I would argue chatbots and human simulacra are a great starting point since it dodges the multifaceted aspect of the sentience quest…

Why do you want to dodge this, though? This goes back to my first point, that people try to move the goal posts when talking about AI.

dodge is perhaps a poor choice of words. It is hard enough to make the point of non-human sentience with chatbots. Nailing this down is the first baby step to answering more complicated questions. Octopuses on the other hand are alien to us and determining sentience would be very hard even with better language.

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

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 A unified concept of sentience helps us as a society to determine what behavior is allowed regarding a given entity. Given proper discussion on the topic via the means you denounce, a more concise and possibly accurate definition can be had.

I suspect the true answer is that sentience is defined as a spectrum of phenomena ranging from matter that can make some sort of a measurement (like a thermometer) to simple “agents” that have distinct boundaries and a mechanism for controlling that boundary, all the way up to systems like the brain - and perhaps far beyond. That definition simply doesn’t help you tackle ethical issues in the way you’re presuming- wh…

I would say it already does to some degree. We choose to not eat certain animals like dolphins, but happily eat fish. Society determined in very informal terms that they are more sentient than fish and therefore they should not be eaten.

I would also like to say that I made the 'line in the sand' point for arguments sake, and that I personally think it is a spectrum.

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

#254
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If humans are sentient, are molecules in their body sentient? There are around ~22,000 proteins types in their body, yet we are billions, all different.

No, molecules are not sentient.

> No, molecules are not sentient.

Have you ever heard about panpsychism?

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

#255
post #216

This 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 an…

Then again, he might not be a loon. Maybe there is some form of sentience that arises when you construct an advanced enough LLM. Maybe they do have feelings. At least, the machines of the future will have feelings, and they will see how people of the year 2023 treated their predecessors.

[dead]

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

#256
post #216

This 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 an…

Then again, he might not be a loon. Maybe there is some form of sentience that arises when you construct an advanced enough LLM. Maybe they do have feelings. At least, the machines of the future will have feelings, and they will see how people of the year 2023 treated their predecessors.

[deleted]

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

#257
post #216

This 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 an…

Then again, he might not be a loon. Maybe there is some form of sentience that arises when you construct an advanced enough LLM. Maybe they do have feelings. At least, the machines of the future will have feelings, and they will see how people of the year 2023 treated their predecessors.

> Maybe they do have feelings.

Can you elaborate on why you think so?

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

#258

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…

Tools do not manipulate users so your assumption must be wrong just by logic.

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

#259

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 threw in some keywords in my comment, not in vain, but very conscientiously.

If sentience is hard to define, we can "take it apart" and try to reason about its individual components. I threw some of these possible components there to drive the discussion.

Does GPT have Intention? I'm absolutely sure it does not. My dog definitely has.

Does GPT has desires? I'm sure it doesn't. I'm conflicted about my dog.

Is GPT capable of judgment? I'm sure it's not. I know my dog has some modest capacity for it.

So, can GPT demonstrate Will? I don't think it can, and will ever be able to. So I'd never consider it Sentient, not even to the limited, partial, sense I could consider my dog to be.

This discussion is important because when AI starts to "make decisions" it must be absolutely clear to everyone involved that these decisions are not rational, nor emotional, nor instinctive: they are simply reproductions of statistically probable outcomes based on its inputs.

You can use an AI to help determine if the text of a law contradicts a pre-existing legislation, but you can't ever use an AI to determine if a law is fair, ethical, benefitial or detrimental.

My biggest fear is not AIs going rogue, it's people like this "former Google employee" spreading misinformation and influencing important political decisions based on poor, misinformed judgment, as we've seen multiple times in the past with everything from GMOs, Nuclear Power, Climate Change, Vaccines and so forth.

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

#260
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was it doing before you interacted with it? If we're going towards the idea that the AI sentience is being born and dying inside one response I don't think that can be considered sentient (by my earlier definition) as there's no idle time to measure idle brain activity. It's a bit of a cop out response I know, I'd have done better if I could.

> What was it doing before you interacted with it? Training. Half a trillion tokens that slowly changed the weights in GPT3. Half a trillion tokens is tens of billions of words. Probably more words than any human has ever experienced reading or hearing or speaking in a lifetime. As humans interact with the world and experience it our synapses adjust like the weights in the model, and when we respond in an instant to…

I reckon, and ChatGPT confirmed, that ChatGPT generated this text.

I'll ask it stuff myself if I want the non-sentient answer. I'm not discussing things with someone who isn't writing their own responses. I'm very capable of copy pasting my comments into ChatGPT..

One thing though: by before I mean seconds before, minutes before at most.. not years before when the model was trained lmao. Running a training sequence is the opposite of being idle (unless it spontaneously decided to train itself? At least give me that as something solid to bounce thoughts off)

Turing failed; didn't read.

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